Gravitational Particle Production of Scalars: Analytic and Numerical Approaches Including Early Reheating

Kavli Affiliate: Edward W. Kolb

| First 5 Authors: Leah Jenks, Edward W. Kolb, Keyer Thyme, ,

| Summary:

Cosmological gravitational particle production (GPP) is a generic mechanism
by which particles are produced during the inflationary epoch. In this work we
consider the GPP of massive scalars in an effort to fully understand the
spectrum of the produced particles. We consider scalars which are conformally
or minimally coupled to gravity, as well as models of both early and late
reheating. We numerically calculate the particle production in each scenario
and compare the results to analytic approximations from boundary matching,
Stokes phenomenon, steepest descent, and inflaton scattering methods. For each
method, we describe the regime of validity and show that there is good
agreement between the analytic and numerical results.

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