Thermal History of the Universe After Inflation

Abstract

When did the universe thermalize? In this talk I review the status of this issue and its importance in establishing the expected properties of dark matter, the growth of large-scale structure, and the viability of inflation models when confronted with CMB observations. I also present a novel approach to tackling the theoretical challenges surrounding inflationary (p)reheating, which seeks to extend past work on the Effective Field Theory of Inflation to the time of reheating.

Invited Plenary Talk at PPC 2015. 6 pages, no figures

References in corpus (9)

• The Effective Field Theory of Inflation
• Starting the Universe: Stable Violation of the Null Energy Condition and Non-standard Cosmologies
• Non-thermal Dark Matter and the Moduli Problem in String Frameworks
• Cosmological Moduli and the Post-Inflationary Universe: A Critical Review
• Inflation and the Scale Dependent Spectral Index: Prospects and Strategies
• Non-thermal Histories and Implications for Structure Formation
• The Dark Matter Annihilation Boost from Low-Temperature Reheating
• Bringing Isolated Dark Matter Out of Isolation: Late-time Reheating and Indirect Detection
• Preheating in Derivatively-Coupled Inflation Models