Informal Pizza Seminar

Reheating in Brane Inflation

Aaron Berndsen

McGill

The success of the inflationary paradigm has prompted numerous efforts seeking to realize inflation within the context of string theory. Warped inflation has, arguably, received the plupart of attention, and it results in several unique features. The reheating scenario is one of those features, resulting from a sequence of intermediary steps as opposed to a direct coupling between the inflaton and standard model particles. This talk will (briefly) review the process of reheating in brane inflation, focussing on the possibility of long-lived relics and a means of accomodating their decay. The results are intriguing, and I will end the talk by breaking supersymmetry, and placing new constraints on the parameters of these constructions.