Nonequilibrium inflaton dynamics and reheating. II. Fermion production, noise, and stochasticity

Abstract

We present a detailed and systematic analysis of the coarse-grained, nonequilibrium dynamics of a scalar inflaton field coupled to a fermion field in the latter stages of the reheating period of inflationary cosmology. We derive coupled nonperturbative equations for the inflaton mean field and variance at two loops in a general curved spacetime, and show that the equations of motion are real and causal, and that the gap equation for the two-point function is dissipative due to fermion particle production. We then specialize to the case of Minkowski space and small-amplitude inflaton oscillations, and derive the perturbative one-loop dissipation and noise kernels to fourth order in the Yukawa coupling constant; the normal-threshold dissipation and noise kernels are shown to satisfy a zero-temperature fluctuation-dissipation relation. We derive a Langevin equation for the dynamics of the inflaton zero mode, and show that its variance is non-negligible during reheating. Stochastic evolution of the inflaton may have important astrophysical consequences.