We study scalar dark matter production and reheating via renormalizable inflaton couplings, which include both quartic and trilinear interactions. These processes often depend crucially on collective effects such as resonances, backreaction and rescattering of the produced particles. To take them into account, we perform lattice simulations and map out parameter space producing the correct (non-thermal) dark matter density. We find that the inflaton-dark matter system can reach a quasi-equilibrium state during preheating already at very small couplings, in which case the dark matter abundance becomes independent of the inflaton-dark matter coupling and is described by a universal formula. Dark matter is readily overproduced and even tiny values of the direct inflaton couplings can be sufficient to get the right composition of the Universe, which reaffirms their importance in cosmology.

We advance in constructing a bottom-up holographic theory of linear meson Regge trajectories that generalizes and unites into one logical framework various bottom-up holographic approaches proposed in the past and scattered in the literature. The starting point of the theory is a quadratic in fields holographic five-dimensional action in which the Poincaré invariance along the holographic coordinate is violated in the most general way compatible with the linear Regge behavior of the discrete spectrum in four dimensions. It is further demonstrated how different Soft Wall (SW) like holographic models existing in the literature plus some new ones emerge from our general setup. Various interrelations between the emerging models are studied. These models include the known SW models with different sign in the exponential background, the SW models with certain generalized backgrounds, with modified metrics, and No Wall models with 5D mass depending on the holographic coordinate in a simple polynomial way. We argue that this dependence allows to describe the effects caused by the main non-local phenomena of strongly coupled 4D gauge theory, the confinement and chiral symmetry breaking, in terms of a local 5D dual field theory in the AdS space. We provide a detailed comparison of our approach with the Light Front holographic QCD, with the spectroscopic predictions of the dual Veneziano like amplitudes, and with the experimental Regge phenomenology. We apply our general approach to a holographic study of confinement, chiral symmetry breaking, and the pion form factor.

The QCD sum rules in the large-N c limit for the light non-strange vector, axial and scalar mesons are considered assuming a string-like linear spectrum for the radially excited states. We propose an improved method for combined analysis of these channels that gives a reasonable description of the observed spectrum. In the vector-axial case, fixing the pion decay constant and the gluon condensate we obtain more or less physical values for the masses of ground states and the quark condensate. Thus a typical need for this method to fix the mass of some ground state is overcome. Using in the scalar channel the values of presumably universal slope of radial trajectories and the quark condensate obtained in the vector-axial channel, we find that, in contrast to some strong claims in the literature, a prediction of light scalar state with a mass close to the mass of f 0 (500) seems to be natural in the considered approach and may follow in a natural way from the Regge phenomenology.

We derive and analyze the confinement potential of the Cornell type within the framework of the generalized Soft Wall holographic model that includes a parameter controlling the intercept of the linear Regge spectrum. In the phenomenology of Regge trajectories, this parameter is very important for the quantitative description of experimental data. Our analysis shows that the "linear plus Coulomb'' confinement potential obtained in the scalar channel is quantitatively consistent with the phenomenology and lattice simulations while the agreement in the vector channel is qualitative only. This result indicates the key role of the vacuum scalar sector in the formation of the confinement potential. As a by-product the overall consistency of our holographic description of confinement potential seems to confirm the glueball nature of the scalar meson f0(1500).

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