# Post-Reheating Inflaton Production as a Probe of Reheating Dynamics

## TL;DR

This paper explores how inflaton particles can be produced after reheating through a new mechanism, offering insights into reheating dynamics and potential explanations for dark matter abundance.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel post-reheating inflaton production channel that can probe reheating processes and relate to dark matter.

## Key findings

- Inflaton quanta can be regenerated after decay from the thermal bath.
- The mechanism provides a new way to investigate reheating dynamics.
- Potential explanation for dark matter abundance from inflaton production.

## Abstract

Cosmological reheating bridges the inflationary epoch and the hot big bang phase, yet its underlying dynamics remain poorly understood. In this work, we investigate a minimal scenario in which the inflaton evolves under a simple power-law potential during reheating and interacts with other particles via renormalizable couplings. We show that inflaton quanta can be regenerated from the thermal bath even after the decay of the coherent inflaton field, unveiling a previously overlooked channel for inflaton particle production, which offers a novel window into probing reheating. Remarkably, this mechanism may also account for the observed dark matter abundance, providing a natural link between early Universe dynamics and present-day cosmological observations.