Strong and Electro-Weak Matter 2026

Gauge-invariant treatment of scalar perturbations during inflation and reheating

19 Aug 2026, 17:40

20m

Agora (1st floor) (University of Helsinki Main Builidng)

poster Early universe physics, inflation, electroweak phase transitions, and sources for gravitational waves Poster Session

Speaker

Alica Ela Rogelj (University of Bern (AEC, ITP))

Description

The late stage of inflation and reheating may be captured by a two-component approach, in which a self-interacting plasma has already attained local equilibrium, while the inflaton field is still far from equilibrium. We describe the foundations of such an approach and present a gauge-invariant numerical implementation in the linear regime. As a particular example, we obtain the power spectrum and spectral tilt for a Standard Model-based scenario.