Reheating with Effective Potentials

TL;DR

This paper studies reheating in a model where a charged inflaton interacts with electromagnetism, leading to a time-dependent photon mass, and develops analytic tools to analyze the inflaton's evolution during reheating.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze reheating with a charged inflaton by deriving analytic approximations for the massive photon propagator and effective force.

Findings

Derived mode function approximations for massive photon propagator.

Provided a simplified way to compute inflaton evolution during reheating.

Enhanced understanding of charged inflaton dynamics in early universe cosmology.

Abstract

We consider reheating for a charged inflaton which is minimally coupled to electromagnetism. The evolution of such an inflaton induces a time-dependent mass for the photon. We show how the massive photon propagator can be expressed as a spatial Fourier mode sum involving three different sorts of mode functions, just like the constant mass case. We develop accurate analytic approximations for these mode functions, and use them to approximate the effective force exerted on the inflaton $0$-mode. This effective force allows one to simply compute the evolution of the inflaton $0$-mode and to follow the progress of reheating.