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Thursday, 30 November 2006, 14:00 in P8445B
Prof. Marco Peloso (University of Minnesota)
The role of SUSY flat directions in reheating
Reheating after inflation describes all the particle physics processes occurring from the decay of the inflaton up to the establishment of thermal equilibrium. Due to the strong model dependence, it is one of the most unknown stages in the history of the universe. There is ongoing effort to determine the reheating temperature within different scenarios (from this quantity, one can then determine the amount of baryons and of unwanted relics, such as gravitinos, produced by the thermal bath). It has been argued that SUSY flat directions are naturally excited during inflation, and that they slow down thermalization, by providing a large effective mass to the fields they are coupled to. We discuss a nonperturbative decay channel for the flat directions which has been generally overlooked in the literature. It typically leads to a quick decay of the flat directions, and, arguably, to a suppression of their delaying effect for thermalization.
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Modified by Andrei Frolov <frolov@sfu.ca> on 2023-11-01