The Secret Higgstory of the Highest Temperature during Reheating
arXiv:2108.00962 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.104.083540
Abstract
We study the role of the Standard Model Higgs condensate, formed during cosmological inflation, in the epoch of reheating that follows. We focus on the scenario where the inflaton decays slowly and perturbatively, so that there is a long period between the end of inflation and the beginning of radiation domination. The Higgs condensate decays non-perturbatively during this period, and we show that it heats the primordial plasma to much higher temperatures than would result from the slowly-decaying inflaton alone. We discuss the effect of this hot plasma on the thermalization of the inflaton's decay products, and study its phenomenological implications for the formation of cosmological relics like dark matter, with associated isocurvature fluctuations, and the restoration of the electroweak and Peccei-Quinn symmetries.
17 pages, 4 figures; matches published version
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Cited by in corpus (7)
- Cascades of high-energy SM particles in the primordial thermal plasma
- Reheating and particle creation in unimodular f(R, T) gravity
- Electroweak Asymmetric Early Universe via a Scalar Condensate
- Connecting Cosmic Inflation to Particle Physics with LiteBIRD, CMB-S4, EUCLID and SKA
- Thermodynamics of the Primordial Universe
- Revisiting the sphaleron and axion production rates in QCD at high temperatures
- The effective Higgs potential and vacuum decay in Starobinsky inflation