Understanding gravitational particle production in quintessential inflation

Abstract

The diagonalization method, introduced by a group of Russian scientists at the beginning of seventies, is used to compute the energy density of superheavy massive particles produced due to a sudden phase transition from inflation to kination in quintessential inflation models, the models unifying inflation with quintessence originally proposed by Peebles-Vilenkin. These superheavy particles must decay in lighter ones to form a relativistic plasma, whose energy density will eventually dominate the one of the inflaton field, in order to have a hot universe after inflation. In the present article we show that, in order that the overproduction of Gravitational Waves (GWs) during this phase transition does not disturb the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) success, the decay has to be produced after the end of the kination regime, obtaining a maximum reheating temperature in the TeV regime.

18 pages, 5 figures. Version accepted for publication in JCAP

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Quintessential inflation in Palatini $f(R)$ gravity
• Quintessential Inflation from Lorentzian Slow Roll
• Cosmological consequences of a scalar field with oscillating equation of state. III. Unifying inflation with dark energy and small tensor-to-scalar ratio
• Gravitational particle production of superheavy massive particles in Quintessential Inflation: A numerical analysis