Schwinger Mechanism During Inflation

Understand

We revisit the efficiency of Schwinger mechanism in creating charged pairs during inflation.

• We consider a minimal setup of inflation in which the inflaton field is a complex scalar field charged under a $U(1)$ gauge field.
• There is a time dependent conformal coupling which pumps energy from the inflaton field to the gauge field to furnish a nearly constant background electric field energy density to drive the Schwinger mechanism.
• The coupling between the gauge field and the scalar field induces a time dependent effective mass for the inflaton field.