Tufts/CfA/MIT Cosmology Seminar, at Tufts:

                     Tuesday February 17, 1998
                             2:30 pm
                          Robinson 250
     Refreshments at 2:00 pm in Robinson 251 (Knipp Library)

"Post-Inflation Reheating: Studying Preheating in an Expanding Universe"
                           David Kaiser
                        Harvard University

Abstract: 

A new view of post-inflation reheating has emerged in recent years, which
focuses on resonances in the inflaton's decay.  In some models, such
resonant decay can produce exponentially greater numbers of particles than
the older, perturbative approximations would suggest, thereby altering the
thermal history of the early universe.  Comparison between preheating
spectra in Minkowski space with those in spatially-flat and spatially-open
FRW metrics will be highlighted.  The use of such preheating formalism to
study other non-equilibrium phase transitions, such as the production and
decay of disordered chiral condensates in relativistic heavy ion
collisions, will also be discussed.