Generalizing the Bogoliubov vs Boltzmann approaches in gravitational production
Phys. Rev. D 112, 043511 – Published 12 August, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/1l7y-rdqr
Abstract
We investigate the spectral behavior of scalar fluctuations generated by gravity during inflation and the subsequent reheating phase. We consider a nonperturbative Bogoliubov treatment within the context of pure gravitational reheating. We compute both long- and short-wavelength spectra, first for a massless scalar field, revealing that the spectral index in part of the infrared (IR) regime varies between and , depending on the postinflationary equation of state (EoS), . Furthermore, we study the mass-breaking effect of the IR spectrum by including the finite mass, , of the daughter scalar field. We show that for , where is the Hubble parameter during inflation, the IR spectrum of scalar fluctuations experiences exponential mass suppression, while for smaller masses, , the spectrum remains flat in the IR regime regardless of the postinflationary EoS. For any general EoS, we also compute a specific IR scale, , of fluctuations below which the IR spectrum will suffer from this finite mass effect. In the UV regime, oscillations of the inflaton background lead to interference terms that explain the high-frequency oscillations in the spectrum. Interestingly, we find that for any EoS, , the spectral behavior turns out to be independent of the EoS, with a spectral index . We have compared this Bogoliubov treatment for the UV regime to perturbative computations with solutions to the Boltzmann equation and found an agreement between the two approaches for any EoS, . We also explore the relationship between the gravitational reheating temperature and the reheating EoS employing the nonperturbative analytic approach, finding that reheating can occur for .