2019/05/14 by Toby Opferkuch, Pedro Schwaller, Ben A. Stefanek · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Classical field theory #Classical mechanics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Curvature #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Gravitation #Gravitational wave #Inflation (cosmology) #Leptogenesis #Mathematical physics #Particle physics #Physics #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum gravity #Quantum mechanics #Scalar (mathematics) #Scalar curvature #Scalar field #Scalar theories of gravitation #Theoretical physics #astro-ph.CO #f(R) gravity #gr-qc #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2019/07/016
9 pages, 6 figures
arxiv created 2019/05/14 · openalex created_date 2019/05/29 · openalex publication_date 2019/07/10 · arxiv updated 2019/07/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
We present a model for viable gravitational reheating involving a scalar field directly coupled to the Ricci curvature scalar. Crucial to the model is a period of kination after inflation, which causes the Ricci scalar to change sign thus inducing a tachyonic effective mass m 2 ∝ − H 2 for the scalar field. The resulting tachyonic growth of the scalar field provides the energy for reheating, allowing for temperatures high enough for thermal leptogenesis. Additionally, the required period of kination necessarily leads to a blue-tilted primordial gravitational wave spectrum with the potential to be detected by future experiments. We find that for reheating temperatures T RH ≲ 1 GeV, the possibility exists for the Higgs field to play the role of the scalar field.