arXiv · 1208.3399
Dynamics of oscillating scalar field in thermal environment
Abstract
There often appear coherently oscillating scalar fields in particle physics motivated cosmological scenarios, which may have rich phenomenological consequences. Scalar fields should somehow interact with background thermal bath in order to decay into radiation at an appropriate epoch, but introducing some couplings to the scalar field makes the dynamics complicated. We investigate in detail the dynamics of a coherently oscillating scalar field, which has renormalizable couplings to another field interacting with thermal background. The scalar field dynamics and its resultant abundance are significantly modified by taking account of following effects : (1) thermal correction to the effective potential, (2) dissipation effect on the scalar field in thermal bath, (3) non-perturbative particle production events and (4) formation of non-topological solitons. There appear many time scales depending on the scalar mass, amplitude, couplings and the background temperature, which make the efficiencies of these effects non-trivial.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Kyohei Mukaida, Kazunori Nakayama. 2013-04-24. Dynamics of oscillating scalar field in thermal environment. https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516%2F2013%2F01%2F017
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.