Rolling in the Modulated Reheating Scenario

Understand

In the modulated reheating scenario, the field that drives inflation has a spatially varying decay rate, and the resulting inhomogeneous reheating process generates adiabatic perturbations.

• We examine the statistical properties of the density perturbations generated in this scenario.
• Unlike earlier analyses, we include the dynamics of the field that determines the inflaton decay rate.
• We show that the dynamics of this modulus field can significantly alter the amplitude of the power spectrum and the bispectrum, even if the modulus field has a simple potential and its effective mass is smaller than the Hubble rate.