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Heavy-ion colliders have revealed the process of fast thermalization. This experimental breakthrough has led to new theoretical tools to study the thermalization process at both weak and strong coupling. We apply this to the reheating epoch of inflationary cosmology, and the formation of a cosmological quark gluon plasma (QGP). We compute the thermalization time of the QGP at reheating, and find it is determined by the energy scale of inflation and the shear viscosity to entropy ratio $eta/s$; or equivalently, the tensor-to-scalar ratio and the strong coupling constant at the epoch of thermalization. Thermalization is achieved near-instantaneously in low-scale inflation and in strongly coupled systems, and takes of order or less than a single e-fold of expansion for weakly-coupled systems or after high-scale inflation. We demonstrate that the predictions of inflation are robust to the physics of thermalization, and find a stochastic background of gravitational waves at frequencies accessible by interferometers, albeit with a small amplitude.
Hilltop inflation models are often described by potentials $V = V_{0}(1-{phi^{n}over m^{n}}+...)$. The omitted terms indicated by ellipsis do not affect inflation for $m lesssim 1$, but the most popular models with $n =2$ and $4$ for $m lesssim 1$ ar
Inflationary scenarios motivated by the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) where five scalar fields are non-minimally coupled to gravity are considered. The potential of the model and the function of non-minimal coupling are polynomials of
The cosmological Slavnov-Taylor (ST) identity of the Einstein-Hilbert action coupled to a single inflaton field is obtained from the Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin (BRST) symmetry associated with diffeomorphism invariance in the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner (ADM
We compute the low energy effective field theory (EFT) expansion for single-field inflationary models that descend from a parent theory containing multiple other scalar fields. By assuming that all other degrees of freedom in the parent theory are su
We discuss and clarify the validity of effective single field theories of inflation obtained by integrating out heavy degrees of freedom in the regime where adiabatic perturbations propagate with a suppressed speed of sound. We show by construction t