Reheating of the Universe as holographic thermalization

TL;DR

This paper models the Universe's reheating process using holographic duality, linking inflaton decay to black hole formation in AdS space, and calculates the reheating temperature with implications for cosmology.

Contribution

It introduces a holographic framework for reheating, connecting inflaton decay to black hole formation in AdS, providing a novel approach to estimate reheating temperature.

Findings

Reheating temperature is lower than instant reheating scenario.

Reheating temperature depends on inflaton energy density and AdS radius.

Model remains within phenomenological bounds.

Abstract

Assuming gauge/gravity correspondence we study reheating of the Universe using its holographic dual. Inflaton decay and thermalisation of the decay products correspond to collapse of a spherical shell and formation of a blackhole in the dual anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. The reheating temperature is computed as the Hawking temperature of the developed blackhole probed by a dynamical boundary, and is determined by the inflaton energy density and the AdS radius, with corrections from the dynamics of the shell collapse. For given initial energy density of the inflaton field the holographic model gives significantly lower reheating temperature than the instant reheating scenario, while it is shown to be safely within phenomenological bounds.