We examine axino dark matter in the regime of a low reheating temperature T_R after inflation and taking into account that reheating is a non-instantaneous process. This can have a significant effect on the dark matter abundance, mainly due to entrop
y production in inflaton decays. We study both thermal and non-thermal production of axinos in the context of the MSSM with ten free parameters. We identify the ranges of the axino mass and the reheating temperature allowed by the LHC and other particle physics data in different models of axino interactions. We confront these limits with cosmological constraints coming the observed dark matter density, large structures formation and big bang nucleosynthesis. We find a number of differences in the phenomenologically acceptable values of the axino mass and the reheating temperature relative to previous studies. In particular, an upper bound on the axino mass becomes dependent on T_R, reaching a maximum value at T_R~10^2 GeV. If the lightest ordinary supersymmetric particle is a wino or a higgsino, we obtain lower a limit of approximately 10 GeV for the reheating temperature. We demonstrate also that entropy production during reheating affects the maximum allowed axino mass and lowest values of the reheating temperature.
The latest results from PLANCK impose strong constraints on features in the spectrum of the curvature perturbations from inflation. We analyse the possibility of particle production induced by sharp turns of the trajectory in field space in inflation
models with multiple fields. Although the evolution of the background fields can be altered by particle production, we find rather modest changes in the power spectrum even for the most extreme case in which the entire kinetic energy of the scalar fields is converted into particles.
We study models of inflation with two scalar fields and non-canonical kinetic terms, focusing on the case in which the curvature and isocurvature perturbations are strongly coupled to each other. In the regime where a heavy mode can be identified and
integrated out, we clarify the passage from the full two-field model to an effectively single-field description. However, the strong coupling sets a new scale in the system, and affects the evolution of the perturbations as well as the beginning of the regime of validity of the effective field theory. In particular, the predictions of the model are sensitive to the relative hierarchy between the coupling and the mass of the heavy mode. As a result, observables are not given unambiguously in terms of the parameters of an effectively single field model with non-trivial sound speed. Finally, the requirement that the sound horizon crossing occurs within the regime of validity of the effective theory leads to a lower bound on the sound speed. Our analysis is done in an extremely simple toy model of slow-roll inflation, which is chosen for its tractability, but is non-trivial enough to illustrate the richness of the dynamics in non-canonical multi-field models.
We argue that in models of inflation with two scalar fields and non-canonical kinetic terms there is a possibility of obtaining a red tilt of the power spectrum of curvature perturbations from noncanonicality-induced interactions between the curvatur
e and isocurvature perturbations. We describe an extremely simple model realizing this idea, study numerically its predictions for the perturbations and discuss applications in realistic scenarios of inflation. We discuss to what extent in this model the scale of the inflationary potential can be decoupled from the amplitude of the density fluctuations.
