Ekpyrotic Reheating and Fate of Inflaton

Abstract

It is shown that perturbative reheating can reach a sufficiently high temperature with small or negligible inflaton decay rate provided that the inflaton potential becomes negative after inflation. In our model, inflaton and dark energy field are two independent scalar fields, and, depending on the mass of the inflaton and its coupling to matter fields, there is a possibility that the remaining inflaton after reheating can become a dark matter candidate.