Heavy particle production during reheating

Abstract

We discuss production of heavy partciles during reheating. We find that the very energetic inflaton decay products can contribute to the production of massive stable particles, either through collisions with the thermal plasma, or through collisions with each other. If such reactions exist, the same massive particles can also be produced directly in inflaton decay, once higher--order processes are included. We show that these new, non--thermal production mechanisms often significantly strengthen constraints on the parameters of models containing massive stable particles.