Theory HEP Seminar

Topics in inflationary cosmology: reheating, gauge fields and gravitational waves

Kaloian Lozanov

UIUC

We will review our current understanding of reheating after inflation, including various aspects of the linear and nonlinear dynamics of the inflaton field, such as parametric resonance, the generation of metric perturbations and the effects of the nonlinear evolution on the post-inflationary expansion history. We will also review the recent progress in the understanding of the non-perturbative dynamics of dark vector fields during reheating and whether they can play the role of dark matter in the late universe. Finally, we will discuss phenomenologically interesting models of primordial non-Gaussian scalar metric perturbations, which can give rise to detectable gravitational waves.