Decaying massive particles in the matter and radiation dominated eras

Abstract

According to the standard model of cosmology, the early universe was dominated by radiation or nonrelativistic matter in several eras of its history. However, many cosmological calculations involving particle processes commonly use Minkowskian results; although, for more precise treatment, quantum field theory in curved spacetime is needed. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting decay rates for matter and radiation dominated universes in this more precise treatment. We provide a study of the average decay rates for a process where a conformally coupled massive scalar field decays into massless scalar particles. It is found that the presence of a curved spacetime modifies the Minkowskian result considerably for early times but asymptotically only by an additive term proportional to the inverse of the mass and interaction time. Thus, the correction is small for large time scales, but on the time scales of the order of m similar to t, the relative correction term may be of importance.