Fermion reheating with a quartic inflaton potential

Abstract

Any viable inflationary model must account for reheating of the universe prior to the onset of primordial nucleosynthesis. In this work, we study the reheating mechanism for an inflaton field with a quartic minimum, assuming that the main particle production channel corresponds to the decay into a pair of spin 1/2 fermions via Yukawa-like interactions. On top of its decays, the self-interaction of the inflaton sources the resonant growth of inflaton inhomogeneities, leading to its eventual fragmentation, unless reheating is completed in a shorter timescale. By means of a combination of non-perturbative (Heisenberg/Bogoliubov) and perturbative (Boltzmann) methods, we find that for Yukawa couplings $y\gtrsim 10^{-8}$ parametric resonance, kinematic blocking, and Pauli suppression effects cannot be ignored to estimate the fermion energy density during reheating. Reheating prior to nucleosynthesis requires couplings above this threshold, and in particular, reheating occurring before fragmentation is only possible for $y\gtrsim 0.2$.