Particle Production from Cosmological Inhomogeneities

Abstract
I will present a new mechanism for particle production in the early universe driven by gravitational inhomogeneities. Unlike in a homogeneous cosmological background, metric perturbations break conformal flatness and can lead to particle production even for massless, conformally coupled fields. I will show how perturbations generated during inflation or cosmological phase transitions can account for the observed dark matter abundance. I will also discuss the connection between this mechanism and gravitational scattering, as well as the associated stochastic gravitational-wave background, which provides a complementary probe of the scenario.

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