Different reheating mechanisms in quintessence inflation

Abstract

Different well-known ways to reheat the Universe, such as instant preheating, the creation of particles nearly or conformally coupled with gravity, or from the decay of products of a curvaton field, are revisited and discussed in detail in the framework of quintessence inflation, where the inflaton field at the end of inflation, instead of oscillating, rolls monotonically towards the infinite to drive the Universe to a kination regime. For any of these preheating (particle creation) mechanisms, in order to calculate the reheating temperature, we point out the importance of the big bang nucleosynthesis bounds and the decay process of the massive fields involved in the theory, whose decay products form a relativistic plasma in thermal equilibrium with energy density that eventually will dominate the one of the background after the phase transition, yielding a universe in thermal equilibrium which matches with the hot Friedmann universe.