Preheating and Reheating after Standard Inflation

Abstract: We study the two-phase scenario following inflation, where the initial step is preheating, accompanied by a step of perturbative reheating at which inflaton field decays transferring all of its energy to create relativistic particles, the interaction of these particles will evolve towards a state of thermal equilibrium with a temperature Tre called the reheating temperature. It is observed that the scenario of reheating normally predicts the maximum reheating temperature that corresponds to an almost instantaneous transition from inflation to the radiation domination era. This will naturally lead to a nonperturbative preheating. In this framework, we propose constraints on the reheating duration parameters expressed in terms of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) inflationary scalar spectral index. In this work, we study the compatibility of polynomial and Higgs models of inflation with the observational data obtained from Planck 2018.