Dissipative Effects on Reheating after Inflation

Abstract

The inflaton must convert its energy into radiation after inflation, which, in a conventional scenario, is caused by the perturbative inflaton decay. This reheating process would be much more complicated in some cases: the decay products obtain masses from an oscillating inflaton and thermal environment, and hence the conventional reheating scenario can be modified. We study in detail processes of particle production from the inflaton, their subsequent thermalization and evolution of inflaton/plasma system by taking dissipation of the inflaton in a hot plasma into account. It is shown that the reheating temperature is significantly affected by these effects.

22 pages, 3 figures; v2: minor changes to reflect the published version

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• 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
• Topological Higgs inflation: The origin of the Standard Model criticality
• Fluctuation-dissipation dynamics of cosmological scalar fields
• Dark Matter Chaotic Inflation in Light of BICEP2
• Damping of an oscillating scalar field indirectly coupled to a thermal bath
• High-Scale SUSY Breaking Models in light of the BICEP2 Result