Different reheating mechanisms in quintessence inflation

TL;DR

This paper reviews various reheating mechanisms in quintessence inflation, emphasizing the importance of particle creation, decay processes, and BBN bounds in determining the reheating temperature and subsequent universe evolution.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of different reheating methods within quintessence inflation, highlighting the role of decay processes and BBN constraints in calculating reheating temperatures.

Findings

Reheating mechanisms include instant preheating, particle creation, and curvaton decay.

Decay processes and BBN bounds are crucial for reheating temperature estimates.

Relativistic plasma from decay dominates energy density after phase transition.

Abstract

Different well-know ways to reheat the universe such as instant preheating, the creation of particles nearly or conformally coupled with gravity, or from the decay products of a curvaton field, are revisited and discussed in detail in the framework of quintessence inflation, where the inflaton field at the end of inflation, instead to oscillate, rolls monotonically towards the infinite to drive the universe to a kination regime. For any kind of these preheating (particle creation) mechanisms, in order to calculate the reheating temperature, we point out the importance of the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis bounds and the decay process of the massive fields involved in the theory, whose decay products form a relativistic plasma whose energy density eventually will dominate the one of the background after the phase transition.