Karam, Alexandros and Raidal, Martti and Tomberg, Eemeli (2021) Gravitational dark matter production in Palatini preheating. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2021 (3): 064. ISSN 1475-7516
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
We study preheating in plateau inflation in the Palatini formulation of general relativity, in a special case that resembles Higgs inflation. It was previously shown that the oscillating inflaton field returns to the plateau repeatedly in this model, and this leads to tachyonic production of inflaton particles. We show that a minimally coupled spectator scalar field can be produced even more efficiently by a similar mechanism. The mechanism is purely gravitational, and the scalar field mass can be of order 1013 GeV, larger than the Hubble scale by many orders of magnitude, making this a candidate for superheavy dark matter.