Research Article

Irreversible Thermodynamic Description of Dark Matter and Radiation Creation during Inflationary Reheating

Figure 1

Time variation of the dark matter energy density (a) and of the radiation (b) during the reheating period in the presence of a large-field polynomial potential, for different values of the decay width of the scalar field: (solid curve), (dotted curve), (dash dotted curve), (dashed curve), and (dash double dotted curve), respectively. For we have adopted the value , while . The initial conditions used to numerically integrate (92) are , , , , and , respectively.
(a)
(b)