Probing Bose-enhanced Inflaton Decay with Gravitational Waves

Abstract

We investigate cosmic reheating dynamics in the presence of a transient condensate formed by bosonic decay products of the inflaton. We show that the emergence of such a condensate and the corresponding Bose enhancement can dramatically increase the efficiency of inflaton decay, giving rise to qualitatively new reheating dynamics beyond the standard perturbative picture. As a consequence, graviton production from inflaton decay processes is significantly amplified by Bose enhancement effects, leading to a stochastic gravitational-wave background with a potentially observable amplitude, even in the low-frequency regime.

Comments: 18+10 pages, 4 figures; minor changes; version accepted for publication in JHEP