Gravitational production of matter and radiation during reheating

Abstract

I present the production of matter and radiation during reheating after inflation, considering only gravitational interactions between the inflaton background and the other sectors. Processes considered are the following: i) the exchange of a graviton, $h_{\mu \nu}$, involved in the scattering of the inflaton or particles in the newly created radiation bath; ii) scattering of the inflaton background and particles in the radiation bath including the effects of non-minimal couplings to curvature of the Higgs boson and the inflaton. Requiring the existence of heavy right-handed neutrinos (RHN), I show that a minimal scenario utilizing only these "gravitational portals" is able to generate simultaneously the observed relic density of Dark Matter (DM), the baryon asymmetry through leptogenesis, as well as a sufficiently hot thermal bath after inflation, for generic models of large field inflation.