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

Figure 2

Time variation of the energy density of the scalar field (a) and of the deceleration parameter (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)