Gravitational reheating

Abstract: Our present understanding of the reheating phase is incomplete due to a lack of observations. Apart from its cosmological implications, the reheating should play a vital role in particle physics and inflation model building. Conventionally reheating dynamics are modeled by invoking arbitrary coupling among the inflaton and daughter fields. Such an approach lacks robust cosmological predictions due to its arbitrary couplings and is difficult to verify through observation. In this paper, we propose a minimal reheating scenario where the inflaton is coupled with all the daughter fields only gravitationally. Besides being successful in reheating the Universe, the scenario offers a strong cosmological prediction of the primordial gravitational wave spectrum and discards a large number of possible models of dark matter and inflation that are otherwise consistent with Planck.