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Originally Posted by photon
I was thinking about this and went and checked and I think I was wrong, the cooling caused the rapid inflation, they talk about the universe being supercooled and then going through a rapid phase transition (kind of like how you supercool water, it's still water, but then you move the glass and it all freezes at once).
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On another forum I asked someone who knows about this stuff about this, this was the answer:
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In Guth's original model inflation was a meta-stable phase, and ended by a first order transition. Such transitions proceed through bubble nucleation. The problem in a nutshell is that if the nucleation rate is large, inflation ends very rapidly (and doesn't serve its purpose). It it's small, it lasts a long time, but each bubble is nearly empty - so no reheating.
In most models that work, there's no such sharp transition. The inflaton gradually rolls down a potential. When it gets down far enough, the potential energy ceases dominating, inflation ends, and much of the potential energy gets rapidly turned into kinetic energy and particles of various sorts.
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So uh, yeah. I obviously still have a long way to go
Neat T@T, do you have a link?