Late Reheating, Hadronic Jets and Baryogenesis

Abstract

If inflaton couples very weakly to ordinary matter the reheating temperature of the universe can be lower than the electroweak scale. In this letter we show that the late reheating occurs in a highly non-uniform way, within narrow areas along the jets produced by ordinary particles originated from inflaton decays. Depending on inflaton mass and decay constant, the initial temperature inside the lumps of the overheated plasma may be large enough to trigger the unsuppressed sphaleron processes with baryon number non-conservation, allowing for efficient local electroweak baryogenesis.