Effect of the Generalized Uncertainty Principle on Post-Inflation Preheating
Wissam Chemissany, Saurya Das, Ahmed Farag Ali, Elias C. Vagenas
备注：
v1: 9 pages, revtex4, no figures, accepted for publication in JCAP; v2: one reference added and various cosmetic (but no physics) changes to match published version
We examine effects of the Generalized Uncertainty Principle, predicted by various theories of quantum gravity to replace the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle near the Planck scale, on post inflation preheating in cosmology, and show that it can predict either an increase or a decrease in parametric resonance and a corresponding change in particle production. Possible implications are considered.
We study preheating in the Palatini formalism with a quadratic inflaton potential and an added $αR^2$ term. In such models, the oscillating inflaton field repeatedly returns to the plateau of the Einstein frame potential, on which the tachyonic instability fragments the inflaton condensate within less than an e-fold. We find that tachyonic preheating takes place when $α\gtrsim 10^{13}$ and that the energy density of the fragmented field grows with the rate $Γ/H \approx 0.011 \times α^{0.31}$. The model extends the family of plateau models with similar preheating behaviour. Although it contains…
We study inflation and preheating in F(R) supergravity characterized by two mass scales of a scalar degree of freedom (scalaron): M (associated with the inflationary era) and m (associated with the preheating era). The allowed values of the masses M and m are derived from the amplitude of the CMB temperature anisotropies. We show that our model is consistent with the joint observational constraints of WMAP and other measurements in the regime where a sufficient amount of inflation (with the number of e-foldings larger than 50) is realized. In the low-energy regime relevant to preheating, we de…
Plateau inflation is an experimentally consistent framework in which the scale of inflation can be kept relatively low. Close to the edge of the plateau, scalar perturbations are subject to a strong tachyonic instability. Tachyonic preheating is realized when, after inflation, the oscillating inflaton repeatedly re-enters the plateau. We develop the analytic theory of this process and expand the linear approach by including backreaction between the coherent background and growing perturbations. For a family of plateau models, the analytic predictions are confronted with numerical estimates. Ou…
We take an analytic approach towards the framework of parametric resonance and apply it on preheating and locked inflation. A two-scalar toy model is analytically solved for the λϕ^2χ^2 coupling for the homogenous modes. The effects of dynamic universe background and backreaction are taken into account. We show the average effect of parametric resonance to be that χ's amplitude doubles for each cycle of ϕ. Our framework partly solves the preheating scenario, showing two distinct stages of preheating and making the parameters of preheating analytically calculable. It is demonstrated for slowrol…
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We study the production of primordial circular ("V-mode") polarization in axion inflation coupled to fermions and gauge fields, with special attention paid to (p)reheating. We construct the power spectrum of $V$, and find a blue-tilted spectrum with index $n_V=4$. This is independent of the dominant decay channel of the inflaton (direct fermion vs. direct photon production)
A new class of non-Gaussian curvature fluctuations ζ_{pr} (\bx) \equiv δN(χ_i) arises from the post-inflation preheating behaviour of a non-inflaton field χ_i. Its billiard-like chaotic dynamics imprints regular log-spaced narrow spikes in the number of preheating e-folds N(χ_i). We perform highly accurate lattice simulations of SUSY-inspired quartic inflaton and coupling potentials in a separate-universe approximation to compute N(χ_i) as a function of the (nearly homogeneous) initial condition χ_i. The super-horizon modes of χ_i(\bx) result in positive spiky excursions in ζ_{pr} and hence ne…
We study preheating following Higgs inflation in the Palatini formulation of gravity. We numerically evolve perturbations of the radial mode of the Higgs field and that of three scalars modeling the gauge bosons. We compare the two non-perturbative mechanisms of growth of excitations -- parametric resonance and tachyonic instability -- and confirm that the latter plays the dominant role. Our results provide further evidence that preheating in Palatini Higgs inflation happens within a single oscillation of the Higgs field about the bottom of its potential, consistent with the approximation of a…
The epochs of reheating and preheating are studied in a simple extension of the Starobinsky inflationary model, which consists of an $R^2$--correction to the Einstein--Hilbert action and an additional scalar field. We find that if the $R^2$--correction at the end of inflation is dynamically important, it affects the expansion rate and as a consequence the reheating and preheating processes. While we find that the reheating temperature and duration of reheating are only slightly affected, the effect has to be taken into account when comparing the theory to data. In the case of preheating, the g…
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It has been argued that the mixed Higgs-$R^2$ model acts as the UV extension of the Higgs inflation, pushing up its cut-off scale in the vacuum close up to the Planck scale. In this letter, we study the inflaton oscillation stage after inflation, focusing on the effective mass of the phase direction of the Higgs field, which can cause a violent preheating process. We find that the "spikes" in the effective mass of the phase direction observed in the Higgs inflation still appear in the mixed Higgs-$R^2$ model. While the spikes appear above the cut-off scale in the Higgs-only case, they appear b…
After cosmic inflation and before the transition to radiation domination, the cosmic energy density may have been dominated during an extended period by an oscillating massive scalar condensate. We show that during this period, sub-Hubble scale perturbations are subject to a metric preheating instability in the narrow resonance regime. We analyze in detail both, quadratic and quartic potentials. The instability leads to the growth of density perturbations which in many cases become non-linear already before the beginning of a radiation dominated Universe. This is particularly the case when req…
Whereas preheating after chaotic and hybrid inflation models has been abundantly studied in the literature, preheating in small field inflation models, where the curvature of the inflaton potential is negative during inflation, remains less explored. In these models, a tachyonic instability at the end of inflation leads to a succession of exponentially large increases and \emph{decreases} of the inflaton fluctuations as the inflaton condensate oscillates around the minimum of its potential. The net effect is a competition between low-momentum modes which grow and decrease significantly, and mo…
We analyze and compare the multi-field dynamics during inflation and preheating in symmetric and asymmetric models of $α$-attractors, characterized by a hyperbolic field-space manifold. We show that the generalized (asymmetric) E- and (symmetric) T-models exhibit identical two-field dynamics during inflation for a wide range of initial conditions. The resulting motion can be decomposed in two approximately single-field segments connected by a sharp turn in field-space. The details of preheating can nevertheless be different. For the T-model one main mass-scale dominates the evolution of fluctu…
Preheating after inflation may lead to nonthermal phase transitions with symmetry restoration. These phase transitions may occur even if the total energy density of fluctuations produced during reheating is relatively small as compared with the vacuum energy in the state with restored symmetry. As a result, in some inflationary models one encounters a secondary, nonthermal stage of inflation due to symmetry restoration after preheating. We review the theory of nonthermal phase transitions and make a prediction about the expansion factor during the secondary inflationary stage. We then present …
Axion monodromy is a generic phenomenon in string compactifications. We investigate the production of gravitational-wave background from axion monodromy inflation during preheating. By performing lattice simulations using pseudo-spectral methods, we find that significant single-peak stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds are generated during preheating for asymptotic linear $|ϕ|$ and $ϕ^{2/3}$ potentials in axion monodromy inflation and cuspy potentials. This may allow us to explore string compactifications through gravitational waves.
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The dynamics of both the preinflationary and the preheating epochs for a model consisting of a Higgs inflaton plus an additional auxiliary field are studied in full General Relativity. The minimally coupled auxiliary field allows for parametric-type resonances that successfully transfer energy from the inflaton condensate to particle excitations in both fields. Depending on the interaction strengths of the fields, the broad resonance periods lead to structure formation consisting of large under/over-densities, and possibly the formation of compact objects. Moreover, when confronting the same m…
We study the stochastic background of gravitational waves produced from preheating in hybrid inflation models. We investigate different dynamical regimes of preheating in these models and we compute the resulting gravity wave spectra using analytical estimates and numerical simulations. We discuss the dependence of the gravity wave frequencies and amplitudes on the various potential parameters. We find that large regions of the parameter space leads to gravity waves that may be observable in upcoming interferometric experiments, including Advanced LIGO, but this generally requires very small c…
We study how the universe reheats following an era of chaotic Dirac-Born-Infeld inflation, and compare the rate of particle production with that in models based on canonical kinetic terms. Particle production occurs through non-perturbative resonances whose structure is modified by the nonlinearities of the Dirac-Born-Infeld action. We investigate these modifications and show that the reheating process may be efficient. We estimate the initial temperature of the subsequent hot, radiation-dominated phase.
Recently, the problem of unitarity violation during the preheating stage of Higgs inflation with a large non-minimal coupling has been much discussed in the literature. We point out that this problem can be translated into a strong coupling problem for the dimensionless effective coupling, and that the existence of these problems is highly dependent on the choice of higher-dimensional operators because they can significantly change the background dynamics and the canonical normalization of the fluctuations around it. Correspondingly, the typical energy of particles produced during the first st…
We propose a scenario where preheating occurs for a specific duration that is parametrized by an e-folds number $N_{pre}$, our results suggest a direct correlation between the preheating duration and the density of gravitational waves (GWs) produced during this phase. Moreover, we investigate the consequences of the inflationary parameters on the $α$-attractor E model in the small $α$ limits. In this framework, we perform investigations on the preheating parameters involving the number of e-folds $N_{pre}$, and the temperature of reheating $T_{re}$, then we show that the parameter $n$ associat…
We investigate the particle production due to parametric resonances in model of inflation where the lightest composite state stemming from the minimal walking technicolor theory plays the role of the inflaton. For model of inflation, the effective theory couples non-minimally to gravity. Regarding the preheating, we study in details a model of a composite inflaton field $ϕ$ coupled to another scalar field $χ$ with the interaction term $g^{2}ϕ^{2}χ^{2}$. Particularly, in the Minkowski space, the stage of parametric resonances can be described by the Mathieu equation. Interestingly, we discover …
During the last ten years a detailed investigation of preheating was performed for chaotic inflation and for hybrid inflation. However, nonperturbative effects during reheating in the new inflation scenario remained practically unexplored. We do a full analysis of preheating in new inflation, using a combination of analytical and numerical methods. We find that the decay of the homogeneous component of the inflaton field and the resulting process of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the simplest models of new inflation usually occurs almost instantly: for the new inflation on the GUT scale it t…
We investigate a compelling model of quintessential inflation in the context of $α$-attractors, which naturally result in a scalar potential featuring two flat regions, the inflationary plateau and the quintessential tail. The "asymptotic freedom" of $α$-attractors, near the kinetic poles, suppresses radiative corrections and interactions, which would otherwise threaten to lift the flatness of the quintessential tail and cause a 5th-force problem respectively. Since this is a non-oscillatory inflation model, we reheat the Universe through instant preheating. The parameter space is constrained …
This is the first of a three-part series of papers, in which we study the preheating phase for multifield models of inflation involving nonminimal couplings. In this paper, we study the single-field attractor behavior that these models exhibit during inflation and quantify its strength and parameter dependence. We further demonstrate that the strong single-field attractor behavior persists after the end of inflation. Preheating in such models therefore generically avoids the "de-phasing" that typically affects multifield models with minimally coupled fields, allowing efficient transfer of ener…
The semiclassical approximation has frequently been used to describe the initial stage of particle production, often called preheating, which occurs after the inflationary epoch in chaotic models of inflation. During this phase backreaction effects from the produced particles on the inflaton field are significant, and one might be concerned about the validity of the semiclassical approximation, even though large backreaction effects are allowed if the inflaton field is coupled to a large number of quantum fields. A criterion is presented for the validity of the semiclassical approximation in t…
We calculate particle production during inflation and in the early stages of reheating after inflation in models with a charged scalar field coupled to Abelian and non-Abelian gauge fields. A detailed analysis of the power spectra of primordial electric fields, magnetic fields and charge fluctuations at the end of inflation and preheating is provided. We carefully account for the Gauss constraints during inflation and preheating, and clarify the role of the longitudinal components of the electric field. We calculate the timescale for the back-reaction of the produced gauge fields on the inflat…
In 'hilltop inflation', inflation takes place when the inflaton field slowly rolls from close to a maximum of its potential (i.e. the 'hilltop') towards its minimum. When the inflaton potential is associated with a phase transition, possible topological defects produced during this phase transition, such as domain walls, are efficiently diluted during inflation. It is typically assumed that they also do not reform after inflation, i.e. that the inflaton field stays on its side of the 'hill', finally performing damped oscillations around the minimum of the potential. In this paper we study the …
This contribution to the proceedings collects new recent results on preheating after inflation. We discuss tachyonic preheating in the SUSY motivated hybrid inflation; development of equilibrium after preheating; theory of fermionic preheating and the problem of gravitino overproduction from preheating.
Here we consider the possibility of preheating the Universe via the parametric amplification of a massless, U(1) abelian gauge field. We assume that the gauge field is coupled to the inflaton via a conformal factor with one free parameter. We present the results of high-resolution three-dimensional simulations of this model and show this mechanism efficiently preheats the Universe to a radiation-dominated final state.
We study the post-inflation dynamics of multifield models involving nonminimal couplings using lattice simulations to capture significant nonlinear effects like backreaction and rescattering. We measure the effective equation of state and typical time-scales for the onset of thermalization, which could affect the usual mapping between predictions for primordial perturbation spectra and measurements of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation. For large values of the nonminimal coupling constants, we find efficient particle production that gives rise to nearly instantaneous pre…
Preheating after inflation may over-produce primordial black holes (PBH's) in many regions of parameter space. As an example we study two-field models with a massless self-interacting inflaton, taking into account second order field and metric backreaction effects as spatial averages. We find that a complex quilt of parameter regions above the Gaussian PBH over-production threshold emerges due to the enhancement of curvature perturbations on all scales. It should be possible to constrain realistic models of inflation through PBH over-production although many issues, such as rescattering and no…
We investigate the feasibility of explosive particle production via parametric resonance or tachyonic preheating in multi-field inflationary models by means of lattice simulations. We observe a strong suppression of resonances in the presence of four-leg interactions between the inflaton fields and a scalar matter field, leading to insufficient preheating when more than two inflatons couple to the same matter field. This suppression is caused by a dephasing of the inflatons that increases the effective mass of the matter field. Including three-leg interactions leads to tachyonic preheating, wh…
We investigate how the production of gravitational waves (GWs) is affected by the GW velocity $(c_T)$ during preheating after inflation. For instance, we simulate the production of GWs after $λϕ^4$ chaotic inflation, and find that GW spectrum is enhanced for $c_T<1$, but distorted (suppressed at low frequency, but enhanced at high frequency) for $c_T>1$.
We study gravitational wave production in an expanding Universe during the first stages following inflation, and investigate the consequences of the Gauss-Bonnet term on the inflationary parameters for a power-law inflation model with a GB coupling term. Moreover, we perform the analyses on the preheating parameters involving the number of e-folds $N_{pre}$, and the temperature of thermalization $T_{th},$ and show that it's sensitive to the parameters $n$, and $γ$, the parameter $γ$ is proposed to connect the density energy at the end of inflation to the preheating energy density. We set a cor…
Preheating after inflation involves large, time-dependent field inhomogeneities, which act as a classical source of gravitational radiation. The resulting spectrum might be probed by direct detection experiments if inflation occurs at a low enough energy scale. In this paper, we develop a theory and algorithm to calculate, analytically and numerically, the spectrum of energy density in gravitational waves produced from an inhomogeneous background of stochastic scalar fields in an expanding universe. We derive some generic analytical results for the emission of gravity waves by stochastic media…
We study preheating in DBI hybrid inflation. Preheating occurs since the matter fields are non-minimally coupled to the inflaton. Despite the coupling being small, preheating happens as a narrow parametric resonance in which matter fields and inflaton modes are exponentially created. We show that, within the approximations used, the process is very efficient at late times. The resonance stage gives way to the decay of the inflaton into bosonic or fermionic degrees of freedom and the corresponding reheating temperature is determined.
We study preheating in plateau inflation in the Palatini formulation of general relativity, in a special case that resembles Higgs inflation. It was previously shown that the oscillating inflaton field returns to the plateau repeatedly in this model, and this leads to tachyonic production of inflaton particles. We show that a minimally coupled spectator scalar field can be produced even more efficiently by a similar mechanism. The mechanism is purely gravitational, and the scalar field mass can be of order $10^{13}$ GeV, larger than the Hubble scale by many orders of magnitude, making this a c…
The nonlinear dynamics of preheating after early-Universe inflation is often studied with lattice simulations. In this work I present a new lattice code HLATTICE. It differs from previous public available codes in the following three aspects: (i) A much higher accuracy is achieved with a modified sixth-order symplectic integrator; (ii) scalar, vector, and tensor metric perturbations in synchronous gauge and their feedback to the dynamics of scalar fields are all included; (iii) the code uses a projector that completely removes the scalar and vector components defined by the discrete spatial de…
In inflationary cosmology, the particles constituting the Universe are created after inflation in the process of reheating due to the interaction with the oscillating inflaton field. We briefly review the basics of the slow reheating, and the stage of fast preheating, when the particles are created explosively in the regime of parametric resonance. The non-perturbative, out-of-equilibrium character of the parametric resonance changes many features of reheating. For these proceedings, we will highlight a few aspects of preheating: the structural dependence of the parametric resonance on the inf…
I review the theory of preheating after inflation, focusing on the recently found tachyonic preheating in the theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking. This occurs due to the tachyonic instability of the scalar field near the top of its effective potential. Contrary to the common expectation, tachyonic instability converts most of the energy into that of colliding classical waves very rapidly, within a single oscillation. Efficient tachyonic preheating is typical for the hybrid inflationary scenario, including SUSY motivated and brane inflation models.
We study the preheating process in a model of DBI inflation with a DBI-type inflaton coupling to a canonical entropy field. At the end of inflation, the inflaton field oscillates around its vacuum which can arise from an infrared cutoff parameter on the warp factor and correspondingly the evolution of its fluctuations can be approximately described by a generalized Hill's equation in third order. We study the field fluctuations numerically and show that they could grow exponentially since the instability bands commonly exist in the DBI models if the amplitudes of background oscillations are of…
It is assumed that during inflation, all energy was contained in a slow-rolling inflaton field $ϕ$. The particles constituting the Universe are created due to interactions with the field $ϕ$ coherently oscillating after inflation. The leading channel of the particle production would be the non-perturbative regime of parametric resonance, preheating. Some of the recent developments in the theory of preheating are briefly reviewed. As a prototype we use the model ${λ\over 4}ϕ^4 + {m^2 \over 2}ϕ^2+ {g^2\over 2}ϕ^2χ^2$ in an expanding universe. In different domains of parameters the character of p…
We discuss the principles governing the selection of inflationary models for which preheating can affect the CMB. This is a (fairly small) subset of those models which have non-negligible entropy/isocurvature perturbations on large scales during inflation. We study new models which belong to this class - two-field inflation with negative nonminimal coupling and hybrid/double/supernatural inflation models where the tachyonic growth of entropy perturbations can lead to the variation of the curvature perturbation, ${\cal R}$, on super-Hubble scales. Finally we present evidence against recent clai…
Particle production and its effects on the inflaton field are investigated during the preheating phase of chaotic inflation using a model consisting of a massive scalar inflaton field coupled to N massless quantum scalar fields. The effects of spacetime curvature and interactions between the quantum fields are ignored. A large N expansion is used to obtain a coupled set of equations including a backreaction equation for the classical inflaton field. Previous studies of preheating using these equations have been done. Here the first numerical solutions to the full set of equations are obtained …
At the end of inflation, the inflaton oscillates at the bottom of its potential and these oscillations trigger a parametric instability for scalar fluctuations with wavelength $λ$ comprised in the instability band $(3H m)^{-1/2} <λ< H^{-1}$, where $H$ is the Hubble parameter and $m$ the curvature of the potential at its minimum. This "metric preheating" instability, which proceeds in the narrow resonance regime, leads to various interesting phenomena such as early structure formation, production of gravitational waves and formation of primordial black holes. In this work we study its fate in t…
Matrix inflation, or M-flation, is a string theory motivated inflationary model with three scalar field matrices and gauge fields in the adjoint representation of the $\mathbf{U}(N)$ gauge group. One of these $3N^2$ scalars appears as the effective inflaton while the rest of the fields (scalar and gauge fields) can play the role of isocurvature fields during inflation and preheat fields afterwards. There is a region in parameter space and initial field values, "the hilltop region," where predictions of the model are quite compatible with the recent Planck data. We show that in this hilltop reg…
We explore preheating in multi-field models of inflation in which the field-space metric is a highly curved hyperbolic manifold. One broad family of such models is called $α$-attractors, whose single-field regimes have been extensively studied in the context of inflation and supergravity. We focus on a simple two-field generalization of the $T$-model, which has received renewed attention in the literature. Krajewski et al. concluded, using lattice simulations, that multi-field effects can dramatically speed-up preheating. We recover their results and further demonstrate that significant analyt…
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 fiel…
By assuming the kinetic coupling $f^{2}(ϕ)FF$ of the effective inflaton field $ϕ$ with the electromagnetic field, we explore magnetogenesis during the inflation and preheating stages in the Starobinsky model. We consider the case of the exponential coupling function $f(ϕ)=\exp(αϕ/M_{p})$ and show that for $α\sim 12-15$ it is possible to generate the large scale magnetic fields with strength $\gtrsim 10^{-15}$ Gauss at the present epoch. The spectrum of generated magnetic fields is blue with the spectral index $n=1+s$, $s>0$. We have found that for the relevant values of the coupling parameter,…
We study the evolution of the Universe at early stages, we discuss also preheating in the framework of hybrid braneworld inflation by setting conditions on the coupling constants $λ$ and $g$\ for effective production of $χ$-particles. Considering the phase between the time observable CMB scales crossed the horizon and the present time, we write reheating and preheating parameters $N_{re}$, $T_{re}$ and $N_{pre}$ in terms of the scalar spectral index $n_{s}$, and prove that, unlike the reheating case, the preheating duration does not depend on the values of the equation of state $ω^{\ast }$. We…
This paper concludes our semi-analytic study of preheating in inflationary models comprised of multiple scalar fields coupled nonminimally to gravity. Using the covariant framework of paper I in this series, we extend the rigid-spacetime results of paper II by considering both the expansion of the universe during preheating, as well as the effect of the coupled metric perturbations on particle production. The adiabatic and isocurvature perturbations are governed by different effective masses that scale differently with the nonminimal couplings and evolve differently in time. The effective mass…
