Inflation and Reheating by Dynamical Torsion

Abstract

In gravity theories with torsion, inflation can be driven by the dynamical torsion. Since it naturally has a derivative coupling to the axial current consisting of Standard Model particles, the reheating dynamics should be much different from conventional inflation models like Starobinsky inflation. We calculate the inflaton decay rate in detail and find that, although the 2 body decay into the fermion pair is vanishing in the massless fermion limit, the anomaly-induced 2 body decay into the gauge bosons and 3 body decay involving the Higgs boson are non-vanishing and they give sizable contributions to the total decay width of the inflaton. This gives a natural lower bound on the reheating temperature in the inflation model with dynamical torsion.