Resonant particle production during inflation: a full analytical study

Abstract

We revisit the study of the phenomenology associated to a burst of particle production of a field whose mass is controlled by the inflaton field and vanishes at one given instance during inflation. This generates a bump in the correlators of the primordial scalar curvature. We provide a unified formalism to compute various effects that have been obtained in the literature and confirm that the dominant effects are due to the rescattering of the produced particles on the inflaton condensate. We improve over existing results (based on numerical fits) by providing exact analytic expressions for the shape and height of the bump, both in the power spectrum and the equilateral bispectrum. We then study the regime of validity of the perturbative computations of this signature. Finally, we extend these computations to the case of a burst of particle production in a sector coupled only gravitationally to the inflaton.

34 pages, 6 figures

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• Implications for Pulsar Timing Arrays of Sub-solar Black Hole Detections: From LVK to Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer
• Large Field Excursions from Dimensional (De)construction
• Degeneracy in the spectrum and bispectrum among featured inflaton potentials
• Extra-Natural Inflation (De)constructed
• Global 21 cm signal: a promising probe of primordial features
• Particle production during inflation: constraints expected from redshifted 21 cm observations from the epoch of reionization
• Particle production during inflation: A Bayesian analysis with CMB data from Planck 2018