Perturbative reheating and thermalization of pure Yang-Mills plasma

2024/02/21 by Kyohei Mukaida, Masaki Yamada, Mukaida, Kyohei +1 · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Laser-induced spectroscopy and plasma #Magnetic confinement fusion research #Plasma Diagnostics and Applications

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2402.14054

openalex publication_date 2024/02/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We investigate the thermalization of high-energy particles injected from the perturbative decay of inflaton during the pre-thermal phase of reheating in detail. In general, thermalization takes a relatively long time in a low-temperature plasma; therefore, the instantaneous thermalization approximation is not justified, even for the reheating of the Standard Model (SM) sector. We consider a pure Yang-Mills (YM) theory as an approximation of the SM sector or a possible dark sector, considering the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal effect, a quantum interference effect in a finite temperature plasma. We perform the first numerical calculation to solve the time evolution of the system, including the redshift due to the expansion of the Universe, and show the details of the temperature evolution near the maximum and the behavior of the quasi-attractors at later times. The maximal temperature T_max and time scale t_max are determined quantitatively, such as T_max ≃ 0.05 × (Γ_I M_Pl²/m_I³)^2/5 m_I and t_max ≃ 2 × 10³ × (Γ_I M_Pl²/m_I³)^-3/5 m_I^-1 in the SM-like system, where m_I and Γ_I are the mass and decay rate of inflaton. We also provide a similar formula for pure \operatorname*SU(N) and \operatorname*SO(N) YM theories for general values of N and coupling constant α, including T_max ∝ α^4/5 and t_max ∝ N^-2 α^-16/5 behaviors and their numerical coefficients. The thermalization occurs in a finite time scale, resulting in a lower maximal temperature of the Universe after inflation than that under the instantaneous thermalization approximation.

Cited by

• Revisiting the sphaleron and axion production rates in QCD at high temperatures

Related

• Thermalization in Yang-Mills Classical Mechanics
• A real-time lattice simulation of the thermalization of a gluon plasma:\n first results
• New Aspects of Reheating
• Two or three things particle physicists (mis)understand about (pre)heating
• Holographic thermalization patterns