2012/09/14 by Thorsten Battefeld, Alexander Eggemeier, John T. Giblin +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #astro-ph.CO #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2012/11/062
published as JCAP 11 (2012) 062 · 44 pages, 23 figures
arxiv created 2012/09/14 · openalex publication_date 2012/11/30 · arxiv updated 2012/12/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We discuss preheating after multi-field inflation in the presence of several preheat matter fields that become light in the vicinity of (but not at) the inflatons' VEV, at distinct extra-species-points (ESP); this setup is motivated by inflationary models that include particle production during inflation, e.g. trapped inflation, grazing ESP encounters or modulated trapping, among others. While de-phasing of inflatons tends to suppress parametric resonance, we find two new effects leading to efficient preheating: particle production during the first in-fall (efficient if many preheat matter fields are present) and a subsequent (narrow) resonance phase (efficient if an ESP happens to be at one of several distinct distances from the inflatons' VEV). Particles produced during the first in-fall are comprised of many species with low occupation number, while the latter are made up of a few species with high occupation number. We provide analytic descriptions of both phases in the absence of back-reaction, which we test numerically. We further perform lattice simulations to investigate the effects of back-reaction. We find resonances to be robust and the most likely cause of inflaton decay in multi-field trapped inflation if ESP distributions are dense.