Dynamics of oscillating scalar field in thermal environment

Abstract

There often appear coherently oscillating scalar fields in particle physics motivated cosmological scenarios, which may have rich phenomenological consequences. Scalar fields should somehow interact with background thermal bath in order to decay into radiation at an appropriate epoch, but introducing some couplings to the scalar field makes the dynamics complicated. We investigate in detail the dynamics of a coherently oscillating scalar field, which has renormalizable couplings to another field interacting with thermal background. The scalar field dynamics and its resultant abundance are significantly modified by taking account of following effects : (1) thermal correction to the effective potential, (2) dissipation effect on the scalar field in thermal bath, (3) non-perturbative particle production events and (4) formation of non-topological solitons. There appear many time scales depending on the scalar mass, amplitude, couplings and the background temperature, which make the efficiencies of these effects non-trivial.

45 pages, 6 figures; v2: several typos corrected; v3: minor corrections and references added; v4: minor corrections to reflect the published version; v5: minor corrections

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Cited by in corpus (20)

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• Observational implications of mattergenesis during inflation
• Higgs inflation and suppression of axion isocurvature perturbation
• Non-Abelian dynamics in the resonant decay of the Higgs after inflation
• On finite density effects on cosmic reheating and moduli decay and implications for Dark Matter production
• Curvaton Decay by Resonant Production of the Standard Model Higgs
• Affleck-Dine Baryogenesis and Dark Matter Production after High-scale Inflation
• Axion Models with High Scale Inflation
• An ultra-weak sector, the strong CP problem and the pseudo-Goldstone dilaton
• Fluctuation-dissipation dynamics of cosmological scalar fields
• Correspondence of I- and Q-balls as Non-relativistic Condensates
• Dark Matter Chaotic Inflation in Light of BICEP2
• Non-Gaussianity from Attractor Curvaton
• Affleck-Dine baryogenesis with R-parity violation
• Thermal blocking of preheating
• High-Scale SUSY Breaking Models in light of the BICEP2 Result
• Thermal Effects and Sudden Decay Approximation in the Curvaton Scenario
• Affleck-Dine baryogenesis after D-term inflation and solutions to the baryon-DM coincidence problem
• The virial relation for the Q-balls in the thermal logarithmic potential revisited analytically