Nonperturbative dynamics of reheating after inflation: A review

The dynamics at the end of inflation can generate an asymmetry between particles and antiparticles of the inflaton field. This asymmetry can be transferred to baryons via decays, generating a baryon asymmetry in our Universe. We explore this idea in detail for a complex inflaton governed by an observationally consistent -"flatter than quadratic"-potential with a weakly broken global U (1) symmetry. We find that most of the inflaton asymmetry is locked in non-topological soliton like configurations (oscillons) produced copiously at the end of inflation. These solitons eventually decay into baryons and generate the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry for a range of model parameters. Through a combination of three dimensional lattice simulations and a detailed linearized analysis, we show how the inflaton asymmetry depends on the fragmentation, the magnitude of the symmetry breaking term and initial conditions at the end of inflation. We discuss the final decay into baryons, but leave a detailed analysis of the inhomogeneous annihilation, reheating and thermalization to future work.As part of our work, we pay particular attention to generating multifield initial conditions for the field fluctuations (including metric perturbations) at the end of inflation for lattice simulations. CONTENTS

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“…(30). This expansion in terms of creation and annihilation operators is consistent with the one provided in the last chapter of [29].…”

Section: Quantization and Power Spectrasupporting

confidence: 87%

End of inflation, oscillons, and matter-antimatter asymmetry

Lozanov

Amin

2014

Phys. Rev. D

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“…For example, different rates for different types of decays into different Standard Model particles may yield different clocks for starting the usual radiationdominated epoch. There may be a preheating stage [6], where there is a resonant production of particles [7], which can enhance the inflaton decay via scattering [8], or where inhomogeneous modes may be excited [9]. Turbulence may also play a role [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Equation-of-state parameter for reheating

2015

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Constraints to the parameters of inflation models are often derived assuming some plausible range for the number-e.g., N k = 46 to N k = 60-of e-folds of inflation that occurred between the time that our current observable Universe exited the horizon and the end of inflation. However, that number is, for any specific inflaton potential, related to an effective equation-of-state parameter wre and temperature Tre, for reheating. Although the physics of reheating is highly uncertain, there is a finite range of reasonable values for wre. Here we show that by restricting wre to this range, more stringent constraints to inflation-model parameters can be derived than those obtained from the usual procedure. To do so, we focus in this work in particular on natural inflation and inflation with a Higgs-like potential, and on power law models as limiting cases of those. As one example, we show that the lower limit to the tensor-to-scalar ratio r, derived from current measurements of the scalar spectral index, is about 20%-25% higher (depending on the model) with this procedure than with the usual approach.

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“…(3.1) changing significantly even during the period of a single inflaton oscillation. However, since particle production only take place during a small fraction of each oscillation, analytic results are possible, and these have been studied carefully in [28,48] (for subsequent literature see the reviews [49][50][51], and references therein).…”

Section: Preheating In Models With Two Sectorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Symmetric and asymmetric reheating

Hardy¹,

Unwin²

2017

J. High Energ. Phys.

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We study models in which the inflaton is coupled to two otherwise decoupled sectors, and the effect of preheating and related processes on their energy densities during the evolution of the universe. Over most of parameter space, preheating is not disrupted by the presence of extra sectors, and even comparatively weakly coupled sectors can get an order 1 fraction of the total energy at this time. If two sectors are both preheated, the high number densities could also lead to inflaton mediated thermalisation. If only one sector is preheated, Bose enhancement of the late time inflaton decays may cause significant deviations from the perturbative prediction for their relative reheat temperatures. Meanwhile, in Non-Oscillatory inflation models resonant effects can result in exponentially large final temperature differences between sectors that have similar couplings to the inflaton. Asymmetric reheating is potentially relevant for a range of beyond the Standard Model physics scenarios. We show that in dark matter freeze-in models, hidden sector temperatures a factor of 10 below that of the visible sector are typically needed for the relic abundance to be set solely by freeze-in dynamics.

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Nonperturbative dynamics of reheating after inflation: A review

Cited by 438 publications

References 317 publications

End of inflation, oscillons, and matter-antimatter asymmetry

End of inflation, oscillons, and matter-antimatter asymmetry

Equation-of-state parameter for reheating

Symmetric and asymmetric reheating

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