{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/pre-thermalized-gravitational-waves","title":"Pre-thermalized Gravitational Waves","arxiv_id":"2503.10756","date":"2025-03-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nicolás Bernal","Quan-feng Wu","Xun-Jie Xu","Yong Xu"],"abstract":"We investigate a novel gravitational wave (GW) production mechanism from gravitons generated during the pre-thermal phase of cosmic reheating, where the energy density is dominated by non-thermalized inflaton decay products, dubbed reheatons. We consider multiple production channels, including: $i)$ pure inflaton-inflaton annihilation, $ii)$ graviton Bremsstrahlung from inflaton decay, $iii)$ scatterings between an inflaton and a reheaton, and $iv)$ scatterings among reheatons. To determine the resulting GW spectrum, we solve the Boltzmann equation to obtain the graviton phase-space distribution for each channel. We find that the third channel, $iii)$, dominates due to the large occupation number of reheatons at highly-energetic states during the pre-thermalization phase. Notably, in scenarios with a low inflaton mass, the GW spectrum could fall within the sensitivity range of future experiments such as the Einstein Telescope, the Cosmic Explorer, the Big Bang Observer, and ultimate DECIGO.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10756v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10756v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"pre-thermalized-gravitational-waves","repo_url":"https://github.com/Fenyutanchan/amplitude-for-inflaton-reheaton-graviton","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}