Gravitational dark matter production in Palatini preheating

We study preheating in plateau inflation in the Palatini formulation of general relativity, in a special case that resembles Higgs inflation. It was previously shown that the oscillating inflaton field returns to the plateau repeatedly in this model, and this leads to tachyonic production of inflato...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of cosmology and astroparticle physics 2021-03, Vol.2021 (3), p.64
Main Authors: Karam, Alexandros, Raidal, Martti, Tomberg, Eemeli
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Dark matter
Heating
Relativity
Scalars
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Summary:We study preheating in plateau inflation in the Palatini formulation of general relativity, in a special case that resembles Higgs inflation. It was previously shown that the oscillating inflaton field returns to the plateau repeatedly in this model, and this leads to tachyonic production of inflaton particles. We show that a minimally coupled spectator scalar field can be produced even more efficiently by a similar mechanism. The mechanism is purely gravitational, and the scalar field mass can be of order 10 13 GeV, larger than the Hubble scale by many orders of magnitude, making this a candidate for superheavy dark matter.
ISSN:1475-7516
1475-7516
DOI:10.1088/1475-7516/2021/03/064