Decaying Massive Particle in Matter and Radiation Dominated Eras

Abstract

According to the standard model of cosmology, the early universe has been dominated by radiation or non-relativistic matter in several eras of its history. However, many cosmological calculations involving particle processes are commonly done using Minkowskian results for them, although, for more precise treatment, quantum field theory in curved spacetime is needed. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting decay rates for matter and radiation dominated universes in this more precise treatment. We provide a study of the average decay rates for a process where a conformally coupled massive scalar field decays into massless scalar particles. It is found that the presence of a curved spacetime modifies the Minkowskian result considerably for early times but asymptotically only by an additive term proportional to the inverse of mass and interaction time. Thus, the correction is small for large time scales, but on the time scales of the order of $m\sim t$, the relative correction term may be of importance.

6 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Condensates and quasiparticles in inflationary cosmology: mass generation and decay widths
• On the Perturbative Stability of Quantum Field Theories in de Sitter Space
• Decay of a Massive Particle in a Stiff Matter Dominated Universe
• Interaction between Maxwell field and charged scalar field in de Sitter universe
• One-photon pair production on the expanding de Sitter spacetime

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Scalar model of effective field theory in curved space
• Reheating via gravitational particle production in kination epoch
• Particle decay in post inflationary cosmology
• Particle decay in expanding Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universes
• Fermionic decay of a massive scalar in the early Universe
• A mechanism for formation of Bose-Einstein condensation in cosmology
• Cosmological decay of Higgs-like scalars into a fermion channel
• Interaction rates in cosmology: heavy particle production and scattering
• Particle physics processes in cosmology through an effective Minkowski space formulation and the limitations of the method
• Reheating in the kination epoch via multi-channel decay of gravitationally created massive scalars
• Condensate decay in a radiation dominated cosmology