  In generic particle physics models, the inflaton field is coupled to other
bosonic and fermionic fields that acquire large masses during inflation and may
decay into light degrees of freedom. This leads to dissipative effects that
modify the inflationary dynamics and may generate a nearly-thermal radiation
bath, such that inflation occurs in a warm rather than supercooled environment.
In this work, we perform a numerical computation and obtain expressions for the
associated dissipation coefficient in supersymmetric models, focusing on the
regime where the radiation temperature is below the heavy mass threshold. The
dissipation coefficient receives contributions from the decay of both on-shell
and off-shell degrees of freedom, which are dominant for small and large
couplings, respectively, taking into account the light field multiplicities. In
particular, we find that the contribution from on-shell decays, although
Boltzmann-suppressed, can be much larger than that of virtual modes, which is
bounded by the validity of a perturbative analysis. This result opens up new
possibilities for realizations of warm inflation in supersymmetric field
theories.
