Reheating after inflaton fragmentation

From MaRDI portal
Publication:6202567

DOI10.1088/1475-7516/2023/11/004arXiv2306.08038MaRDI QIDQ6202567FDOQ6202567


Authors: Marcos A. G. Garcia, Mathias Pierre Edit this on Wikidata


Publication date: 26 February 2024

Published in: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: In the presence of self-interactions, the post-inflationary evolution of the inflaton field is driven into the non-linear regime by the resonant growth of its fluctuations. The once spatially homogeneous coherent inflaton is converted into a collection of inflaton particles with non-vanishing momentum. Fragmentation significantly alters the energy transfer rate to the inflaton's offspring during the reheating epoch. In this work we introduce a formalism to quantify the effect of fragmentation on particle production rates, and determine the evolution of the inflaton and radiation energy densities, including the corresponding reheating temperatures. For an inflaton potential with a quartic minimum, we find that the efficiency of reheating is drastically diminished after backreaction, yet it can lead to temperatures above the big bang nucleosynthesis limit for sufficiently large couplings. In addition, we use a lattice simulation to estimate the spectrum of induced gravitational waves, sourced by the scalar inhomogeneities, and discuss detectability prospects. We find that a Boltzmann approach allows to accurately predict some of the main features of this spectrum.


Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08038




Recommendations




Cites Work


Cited In (8)





This page was built for publication: Reheating after inflaton fragmentation

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q6202567)