Two-phase reheating: CMB constraints on inflation and dark matter phenomenology

Abstract

We propose a two-phase reheating scenario where the initial preheating dynamics is described by an effective dynamics followed by the standard perturbative reheating. Some of the important universal results of lattice simulation during preheating have been considered as crucial inputs in our two-phase dynamics. In this framework, detailed phenomenological constraints have been obtained on the inflaton couplings with reheating fields, and dark matter parameters in terms of CMB constrained inflationary scalar spectral index. It is observed that the conventional reheating scenario generically predicts the maximum reheating temperature $T_{re}^{max} \simeq 10^{15}$ GeV, corresponding to an almost instantaneous transition from the end of inflation to radiation domination. This fact will naturally lead to the problem of non-perturbative inflaton decay, which is in direct conflict with the perturbative reheating itself. Taking into account this by incorporating effective non-perturbative dynamics as the initial phase, our model of two-phase reheating scenarios also predicts model-independent maximum reheating temperature, which does not correspond to the instantaneous process. Further, $T_{re}^{max}$ is predicted to lie within $(10^{13}, 10^{10})$ GeV if CMB constraints on inflaton couplings with different reheating field are taken into account. We have further studied in detail the dark matter phenomenology in a model-independent manner and show how dark matter parameter space can be constrained through CMB parameters via the inflaton spectral index. Considering dark matter production during reheating via the Freeze-in mechanism, its parameter space has been observed to be highly constrained by our two-phase reheating than the constraints predicted by the conventional reheating scenarios, which are believed to theoretically incomplete.