Reheating for Closed String Inflation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the reheating process in string theory inflation models, revealing challenges in exciting visible sector particles and constraints on hidden sector models, with implications for supersymmetry and cosmology.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of inflaton couplings in LARGE volume type IIB compactifications, highlighting the difficulty in reheating the visible sector and proposing a pure N=1 SYM hidden sector as a solution.

Findings

Hidden sector fields are predominantly excited after inflation.

Reheating the visible sector is challenging due to inflaton coupling constraints.

A pure N=1 SYM hidden sector can prevent inflaton decay into hidden fields.

Abstract

We point out some of the outstanding challenges for embedding inflationary cosmology within string theory studying the process of reheating for models where the inflaton is a closed string mode parameterising the size of an internal cycle of the compactification manifold. A realistic model of inflation must explain the tiny perturbations in the cosmic microwave background radiation and also how to excite the ordinary matter degrees of freedom after inflation, required for the success of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. We study these issues focusing on two promising inflationary models embedded in LARGE volume type IIB flux compactifications. We show that phenomenological requirements and consistency of the effective field theory treatment imply the presence at low energies of a hidden sector together with a visible sector, where the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model fields are residing. A detailed calculation of the inflaton coupling to the fields of the hidden sector, visible sector, and moduli sector, reveals that the inflaton fails to excite primarily the visible sector fields, instead hidden sector fields are excited copiously after the end of inflation. This sets severe constraints on hidden sector model building where the most promising scenario emerges as a pure N=1 SYM theory, forbidding the kinematical decay of the inflaton to the hidden sector. In this case it is possible to reheat the Universe with the visible degrees of freedom even though in some cases we discover a new tension between TeV scale SUSY and reheating on top of the well-known tension between TeV scale SUSY and inflation.