Speaker
Description
The viability of cosmic inflation depends on an efficient reheating phase that converts the inflaton's energy into Standard Model particles. This conversion preferably proceeds through non-perturbative resonance, which is described by Hill's equation. In this talk, I’ll show how stochastic fluctuations in the parameters of Hill's equation can influence particle production during reheating. Such fluctuations can arise from couplings to light scalar fields, and can alter the resonance structure, thereby broadening the region of efficient energy transfer. These results suggest that stochastic effects can robustly enhance the efficacy of reheating over a broader parameter space than the noiseless case. The applicability of this result extends to similar issues such as the cosmological moduli problem.