Title: A brief history of the Higgs boson-induced reheating
According to the standard model of cosmology, the Universe at
its very beginning underwent a phase of rapid, exponential expansion,
followed by a reheating period. During this epoch, the energy density,
initially accumulated in the oscillations of the inflaton field, was
injected into the visible sector, eventually setting the initial
conditions for the hot big bang. In this talk, I will discuss the
perturbative production of the Standard Model (SM) radiation and dark
matter (DM) adopting a non-standard post-inflationary scenario with a
generic equation-of-state $w$. In particular, I will explore the Higgs
boson-induced reheating, assuming that it is achieved through a cubic
inflaton-Higgs coupling $\phi |\mathcal{H}|^2$. In the presence of such
interaction, the Higgs doublet acquires a $\phi$-dependent mass which
generates a vacuum expectation value that oscillates in time and breaks
the SM gauge symmetry. Moreover, the non-zero mass of the Higgs field
leads to a time-dependent inflaton decay rate and generates a
kinematical suppression of the SM radiation production. This, in turn,
has non-trivial consequences for the dynamics of the reheating period,
modifying the evolution of the radiation energy density and thus the UV
freeze-in production of DM.