Reheating as a surface effect

Phys Rev Lett. 2002 Aug 26;89(9):091301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.89.091301. Epub 2002 Aug 7.

Abstract

We describe a new mechanism for reheating the Universe through evaporation of a surface charge of a fragmented inflaton condensate. We show that for a range of Yukawa coupling of the inflaton to the matter sector evaporation gives rise to a much smaller reheat temperature compared to the standard perturbative decay. As a consequence, reheating through a surface effect could solve the gravitino and moduli overproduction problem in inflationary models without fine tuning the Yukawa sector.