Reheating the universe with many scalar fields

Selim Hotinli (Imperial College)

October 02, 2017

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Abstract: Reheating describes the process by which the universe transitions from inflation (a period of accelerated expansion) to the thermal state of the hot Big Bang expansion. Both inflation and reheating connect the large scale cosmological observables with fundamental physics. Understanding the rich phenomenology of theories where the dynamics of the early universe is driven by many scalar fields is important when making predictions for the cosmological observables and may be essential for the future experiments like CMB-S4. In this talk I will discuss the phenomenological outcomes of having many scalar fields in the early universe and describe a method for calculating the impact of reheating on inflationary observables. I will show how predictions of inflationary observables can be very sensitive to reheating, allowing models like N-quadratic inflation to fit into Planck-compatible limits.