Particle creation and warm inflation

Abstract

During cosmological inflation, it has been suggested that fields coupled to the inflaton can be excited by the slow-rolling inflaton into a quasi-stable non-vacuum state. Within this scenario of “warm inflation”, this could allow for a smooth transition to a radiation dominated Universe without a separate reheating stage and a modification of the slow roll evolution, as the heat-bath backreacts on the inflaton through friction. In order to study this from first principles, we investigate the dynamics of a scalar field coupled to the inflaton and N light scalar boson fields, using the 2PI-1/N expansion for nonequilibrium quantum fields. As a first step we restrict ourselves to Minkowski spacetime, interpret the inflaton as a time-dependent background, and use vacuum initial conditions. We find that the dominant effect is particle creation at late stages of the evolution due to the effective time-dependent mass. The further transfer of energy to the light degrees of freedom and subsequent equilibration only occurs after the end of inflation. As a consequence, the adiabatic constraint, which is assumed in most studies of warm inflation, is not satisfied when starting from an initial vacuum state.