title: Quantum theory of fermion production after inflation.
abstract: We show that quantum effects dramatically enhance the production of fermions following preheating after inflation in the early Universe in the presence of high excitations of bosonic quanta. As a consequence, fermions rapidly approach a quasistationary distribution with a thermal occupancy in the infrared, while the inflaton enters a turbulent scaling regime. The failure of standard semiclassical descriptions based on the Dirac equation with a homogeneous background field is caused by nonperturbatively high boson occupation numbers. During preheating the inflaton occupation number increases, thus leading to a dynamical mechanism for the enhanced production of fermions from the rescattering of the inflaton quanta. We comment on related phenomena in heavy-ion collisions for the production of quark matter fields from highly occupied gauge bosons.
authors: Institute for Nuclear Physics, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany.
authors: Jürgen
authors: J
authors: Berges
authors: Daniil
authors: D
authors: Gelfand
authors: Jens
authors: J
authors: Pruschke