Toward an Effective Field Theory Approach to Reheating

Understand

We investigate whether Effective Field Theory (EFT) approaches, which have been useful in examining inflation and dark energy, can also be used to establish a systematic approach to inflationary reheating.

• We consider two methods.
• First, we extend Weinberg's background EFT to the end of inflation and reheating.
• We establish when parametric resonance and decay of the inflaton occurs, but also find intrinsic theoretical limitations, which make it difficult to capture some reheating models.