Thermalization After Inflation and Reheating Temperature

Abstract

We present a detailed examination of thermalization after inflation for perturbative inflaton decay. Different interactions among particles in the plasma of inflaton decay products are considered and it will be shown that 2 -> 2 scatterings and particle decay are the important ones. We show that thermalization occurs after decays dominate scatterings, and that depending on the typical mass scale of inflaton decay products, different situations may arise. In particular, thermalization may be delayed until late times, in which case the bounds from thermal gravitino production on supersymmetric models of inflation are considerably relaxed. We will also consider the case where the observable sector consists only of the MSSM matter content, and point out that flat directions with large vevs may result in earlier thermalization of the plasma and push the reheat temperature towards its upper limit.

18 pages, LaTeX, a few references added and revised

References in corpus (6)

• Gravitino Production After Inflation
• Thermal and Non-Thermal Production of Gravitinos in the Early Universe
• Non-Thermal Production of Dangerous Relics in the Early Universe
• Production of spin 3/2 particles from vacuum fluctuations
• Reheating Temperature and Inflaton Mass Bounds from Thermalization After Inflation
• Late-time creation of gravitinos from the vacuum

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