CONSTRAINTS ON THE THREE-FLUID MODEL OF CURVATON DECAY

A three-fluid system describing the decay of the curvaton is studied by numerical and analytical means. We place constraints on the allowed interaction strengths between the fluids and initial curvaton density by requiring that the curvaton should decay before nucleosynthesis while nucleosynthesis, radiation-matter equality and decoupling occur at correct temperatures. We find that with a continuous, time-independent interaction, a small initial curvaton density is naturally preferred along with a low reheating temperature. Allowing for a time-dependent interaction, this constraint can be relaxed. In both cases, a purely adiabatic final state can be generated, but not without fine-tuning. Unlike in the two-fluid system, the time-dependent interactions are found to have a small effect on the curvature perturbation itself, due to the different nature of the system.