A dynamical inflaton coupled to strongly interacting matter
Christian Ecker (Frankfurt U.)

According to the inflationary theory of cosmology, most elementary particles in the current universe were created during a period of reheating after inflation. In this talk I will show how to self-consistently couple the Einstein-inflaton equations to a strongly coupled quantum field theory (QFT) that is described by holography. I will then use a specific example to demonstrate that this setup leads to an inflating universe, a reheating phase and finally a universe dominated by the QFT in thermal equilibrium.
This talk is based on arXiv:2302.06618.