Graceful exit from inflation and reheating with twin waterfalls
Hyun Min Lee, Adriana Menkara

TL;DR
This paper explores a hybrid inflation model with pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson inflaton and waterfall fields, demonstrating a mechanism for reheating and dark matter production via waterfall dynamics and symmetries.
Contribution
It introduces a novel hybrid inflation framework with specific symmetries that ensure flatness, facilitate reheating, and naturally produce dark matter candidates.
Findings
Reheating temperature is sufficiently high due to Higgs portal couplings.
The model naturally includes a dark matter candidate from waterfall fields.
Preheating can produce the correct relic density of waterfall dark matter.
Abstract
We study the hybrid inflation with a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson inflaton and two waterfall scalar fields. The symmetry for the waterfall fields keeps inflaton potential flat against quantum corrections coming from the waterfall couplings, and it is broken spontaneously in the vacuum without a domain wall problem within the Hubble horizon of our universe. We show that the invariant Higgs portal couplings to the waterfall fields are responsible for the reheating process, leading to a sufficiently large reheating temperature after inflation. In the presence of an extra symmetry, one of the waterfall fields or another singlet scalar field becomes a dark matter candidate. In particular, we find that preheating is sufficient to account for the correct relic density of the waterfall dark matter.
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Taxonomy
TopicsCosmology and Gravitation Theories · Black Holes and Theoretical Physics · Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies
