Reheating in a Brane Monodromy Inflation Model

TL;DR

This paper investigates reheating in a brane monodromy inflation model, showing that reheating occurs primarily during the final brane collision, leading to an efficient process with a high reheat temperature.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of reheating dynamics in a brane monodromy inflation scenario, emphasizing the significance of the last brane collision.

Findings

Reheating is dominated by the final brane collision.

Previous collisions have negligible impact on the reheating process.

Reheating is efficient with a high reheat temperature.

Abstract

We study reheating in a recently proposed brane "monodromy inflation" model in which the inflaton is the position of a D4 brane on a "twisted torus". Specifically, we study the repeated collisions between the D4 brane and a D6 brane (on which the Standard Model fields are assumed to be localized) at a fixed position along the monodromy direction as the D4 brane rolls down its potential. We find that there is no trapping of the rolling D4 brane until it reaches the bottom of its potential, and that reheating is entirely described by the last brane encounter. Previous collisions have negligible effect on the brane velocity and hence on the reheat temperature. In the context of our setup, reheating is efficient and the reheat temperature is therefore high.