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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… Click to show full 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.
Journal Title: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Year Published: 2020
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