QSimFP FVD Seminar: Nonperturbative Dynamics of Post-Inflation Reheating

Bio and Abstract

Bio: David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several award-winning books about modern physics. His latest book, Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World (2020), was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and also honored as among the best books of the year by Physics Today and Physics World magazines. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Kaiser has received MIT's highest awards for excellence in teaching. His work has been featured in Science, Nature, the New York Times, and the New Yorker magazine. His group's recent efforts to conduct a "Cosmic Bell" test of quantum entanglement, in collaboration with Nobel laureate Anton Zeilinger, were featured in the documentary film Einstein's Quantum Riddle.

Abstract:Our understanding of the state of the universe between the end of early-universe inflation and big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) is incomplete. To preserve the successes of the standard big bang model, the energy density that had driven inflation must be dispersed rapidly into a hot, thermal bath of Standard Model particles with a radiation-like equation of state. Although the early resonance phase of "preheating" can be accurately studied within a linearized approximation, the processes most critical for observational consistency are inherently nonlinear, and can unfold over distinct time-scales. In this talk I will review our current understanding of the nonperturbative dynamics at the end of inflation; some salient features of reheating in models that incorporate realistic features from high-energy particle physics; possible impacts of gravitational metric perturbations during reheating; and how the universe reaches a thermal state before BBN.