Reheating with Effective Potentials

Abstract

We consider reheating for a charged inflaton which is minimally coupled to electromagnetism. The evolution of such an inflaton induces a time-dependent mass for the photon. We show how the massive photon propagator can be expressed as a spatial Fourier mode sum involving three different sorts of mode functions, just like the constant mass case. We develop accurate analytic approximations for these mode functions, and use them to approximate the effective force exerted on the inflaton $0$-mode. This effective force allows one to simply compute the evolution of the inflaton $0$-mode and to follow the progress of reheating.

arXiv comment24 pages, 11 figures, uses LaTeX2e, Version 2 has 2 small typos corrected to reflect the published version

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Photon propagator in de Sitter space in the general covariant gauge
• When tadpoles matter: One-loop corrections for spectator Higgs in inflation