Fermion (non)reheating with a quartic inflaton potential

Abstract

Any viable inflationary model must account for reheating of the universe prior to the onset of primordial nucleosynthesis. In this work, we study the (p)reheating mechanism for an inflaton field with a quartic minimum of the T-model kind with coupling $\lambda$, prior to and post fragmentation, making a clear distinction between the two regimes. We assume that the main particle production channel corresponds to the decay into a pair of spin 1/2 fermions via Yukawa-like interactions. On top of its decays, we also consider the self-interaction of the inflaton, which sources the resonant growth of inflaton inhomogeneities, possibly leading to its eventual fragmentation. By means of a combination of non-perturbative (Heisenberg/Bogoliubov) and perturbative (Boltzmann) methods, we find that for Yukawa couplings that seemed to be intuitively perturbative, such as $y\gtrsim 10^{-8}$ ($y^2/\lambda\gtrsim 3\times10^{-5}$), parametric resonance, kinematic blocking, and Pauli suppression effects cannot be ignored. Additionally, we show that achieving $\rho_\phi \sim \rho_\psi$ prior to fragmentation requires large couplings, $y\gtrsim 0.2$ ($y^2/\lambda\gtrsim 10^{10}$), which needs a detailed study of backreaction and radiative corrections. Thus the rest of our work constitutes studying post-fragmentation fermion production where we conclude that, in general, reheating in this setup is not possible and thus we conclude that in order to successfully reheat, one must invoke a coupling to a integer- and/or 0-spin particle like a scalar boson.