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Heavy-ion colliders have revealed the process of "fast thermalization". Thisexperimental breakthrough has led to new theoretical tools to study thethermalization process at both weak and strong coupling. We apply this to thereheating epoch of inflationary cosmology, and the formation of a cosmologicalquark gluon plasma (QGP). We compute the thermalization time of the QGP atreheating, and find it is determined by the energy scale of inflation and theshear viscosity to entropy ratio $\eta/s$; or equivalently, thetensor-to-scalar ratio and the strong coupling constant at the epoch ofthermalization. Thermalization is achieved near-instantaneously in low-scaleinflation and in strongly coupled systems, and takes of order or less than asingle e-fold of expansion for weakly-coupled systems or after high-scaleinflation. We demonstrate that the predictions of inflation are robust to thephysics of thermalization, and find a stochastic background of gravitationalwaves at frequencies accessible by interferometers, albeit with a smallamplitude.

The Cosmological Heavy Ion Collider: Fast Thermalization after Cosmic Inflation