Late vacuum choice and slow roll approximation in gravitational particle production during reheating

TL;DR

This paper investigates gravitational particle production during the transition from inflation to reheating, emphasizing the impact of Ricci scalar oscillations and proposing a new vacuum prescription to improve abundance predictions for dark matter.

Contribution

It introduces a new approximation for mode solutions during slow-roll inflation and a vacuum prescription that accounts for Ricci oscillations, enhancing the accuracy of particle production calculations.

Findings

Ricci scalar oscillations significantly affect particle spectra.

The proposed vacuum prescription improves the reliability of abundance estimates.

The mechanism can produce dark matter consistent with observations.

Abstract

In the transition between inflation and reheating, the curvature scalar typically undergoes oscillations which have significant impact on the density of gravitationally produced particles. The commonly used adiabatic vacuum prescription for the extraction of produced particle spectra becomes a non-reliable definition of vacuum in the regimes for which this oscillatory behavior is important. In this work, we study particle production for a scalar field non-minimally coupled to gravity, taking into account the complete dynamics of spacetime during inflation and reheating. We derive an approximation for the solution to the mode equation during the slow-roll of the inflaton and analyze the importance of Ricci scalar oscillations in the resulting spectra. Additionally, we propose a prescription for the vacuum that allows to safely extrapolate the result to the present, given that the test field interacts only gravitationally. Lastly, we calculate the abundance of dark matter this mechanism yields and compare it to observations.