Reheating of the Universe and evolution of the inflaton

JUAN PABLO PAZ; FRANCISCO DIEGO MAZZITELLI; CLAUDIO EL HASI

PHYSICAL REVIEW D - PARTICLE AND FILDS

AIP

Lugar: NEW YORK ; Año: 1989 vol. 40 p. 955 - 966

0556-2821

The problem of the reheating of the Universe after inflation is considered. Our approach is based on the use, as "first principles," of the renormalized version of (a) the evolution equation for the mean value of an interacting scalar field and (b) the semiclassical Einstein equations. We compute (for two different toy models) the characteristic time for the damping of the mean-value oscillations. We show that when the oscillations are damped the Universe becomes radiation dominated and inflation ends. The techniques used in this paper are those of quantum field theory in curved space-time and can be generalized to more realistic models.