Reheating via gravitational particle production in the kination epoch

Abstract

We provide a detailed study of reheating in the kination regime where particle content is created by gravitational production of massive scalars mutually interacting with a massless scalar field. The produced particles subsequently decay into massless particles eventually reheating the Universe. We aim for a more precise picture using Boltzmann equations and decay rates obtained by methods of quantum field theory in curved spacetime. By numerical calculations it is found that after inflation the Universe ends up being dominated by ordinary matter for a while before the radiation-dominated era. The reheating temperature is found to be in the ${10}^{4}--{10}^{12}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{GeV}$ regime.