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Gravitational wave signals and cosmological consequences of gravitational reheating

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Published 17 April 2018 © 2018 IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab
, , Citation Michał Artymowski et al JCAP04(2018)046 DOI 10.1088/1475-7516/2018/04/046

1475-7516/2018/04/046

Abstract

Reheating after inflation can proceed even if the inflaton couples to Standard Model (SM) particles only gravitationally. However, particle production during the transition between de-Sitter expansion and a decelerating Universe is rather inefficient and the necessity to recover the visible Universe leads to a non-standard cosmological evolution initially dominated by remnants of the inflaton field. We remain agnostic to the specific dynamics of the inflaton field and discuss a generic scenario in which its remnants behave as a perfect fluid with a general barotropic parameter w. Using CMB and BBN constraints we derive the allowed range of inflationary scales. We also show that this scenario results in a characteristic primordial Gravitational Wave (GW) spectrum which gives hope for observation in upcoming runs of LIGO as well as in other planned experiments.

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10.1088/1475-7516/2018/04/046