Perturbative Reheating in Sneutrino-Higgs Cosmology

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the perturbative reheating process in Sneutrino-Higgs cosmology within the $B-L$ MSSM, calculating decay rates, energy densities, and reheating temperature, and exploring conditions for a lower $B-L$ breaking scale.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analytical and numerical study of reheating in Sneutrino-Higgs cosmology, including decay rates, thermalization, and conditions for a smaller $B-L$ breaking scale.

Findings

Reheating temperature is approximately 1.13 x 10^{13} GeV.

Inflaton energy density vanishes at around 10^{13} GeV.

The $B-L$ breaking scale can be significantly smaller than the reheating scale.

Abstract

The theory of perturbative reheating in the Sneutrino-Higgs cosmology of the $B-L$ MSSM is presented. It is shown that following an epoch of inflation consistent with all Planck2015 data, the inflaton begins to oscillate around its minimum at zero and to reheat to various species of standard model and supersymmetric matter. The perturbative decay rates to this matter are computed, both analytically and numerically. Using these results, the Hubble parameter and the relative energy densities for each matter species, including that of the inflaton, are calculated numerically. The inflaton energy density is demonstrated to vanish at an energy scale of ${\cal{O}}(10^{13})~{\rm GeV}$, signaling the end of the period of reheating. The newly created matter background is shown to be in thermal equilibrium, with a reheating temperature of $\simeq 1.13 \times 10^{13}~{\rm GeV}$. To allow for a $B-L$ breaking scale sufficiently smaller than the reheating scale, we extend the statistical method of determining the soft supersymmetry breaking parameters developed in previous work. The result is that one can determine a large number of phenomenologically realistic initial conditions for which the $B-L$ breaking scale is an order of magnitude or more smaller than the reheating scale.