Resonant particle production during inflation: a full analytical study
Lauren Pearce, Marco Peloso, Lorenzo Sorbo
2017
Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
We revisit the study of the phenomenology associated to a burst of particle production of a field whose mass is controlled by the inflaton field and vanishes at one given instance during inflation. This generates a bump in the correlators of the primordial scalar curvature. We provide a unified formalism to compute various effects that have been obtained in the literature and confirm that the dominant effects are due to the rescattering of the produced particles on the inflaton condensate. We
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... prove over existing results (based on numerical fits) by providing exact analytic expressions for the shape and height of the bump, both in the power spectrum and the equilateral bispectrum. We then study the regime of validity of the perturbative computations of this signature. Finally, we extend these computations to the case of a burst of particle production in a sector coupled only gravitationally to the inflaton.
doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2017/05/054
fatcat:zrewe7pc55dlliprnstomjwppq