Hot Big Bang from inflation without the inflaton reheating

Abstract

According to the standard lore, a prolonged inflation leaves a quantum field theory in a cold, low entropy state. Thus, some mechanism is needed to reheat this post-inflationary state, leaving a hot, thermal, radiation-dominated Universe. Typically, reheating is achieved coupling the inflaton field to the QFT degrees of freedom. We argue that the nonequilibrium dynamics of a non-conformal QFT in (post-)inflationary background space-time can produce hot quark-gluon plasma with the reheating temperature of order the inflationary Hubble scale, without the inflaton coupling.

arXiv comment10 pages, 1 figure. v2: refs and supplemental material added

References in corpus (10)

• The Large N Limit of Superconformal Field Theories and Supergravity
• Towards the Theory of Reheating After Inflation
• Quintessential inflation
• Black hole boundaries
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• Universality of Abrupt Holographic Quenches
• Equilibration rates in a strongly coupled nonconformal quark-gluon plasma
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• Universal relaxation in quark-gluon plasma at strong coupling

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Gravitational reheating at strong coupling