Dynamics of Symmetry Breaking and Tachyonic Preheating
Abstract
We reconsider the old problem of the dynamics of spontaneous symmetry breaking using 3d lattice simulations, and develop a theory of tachyonic preheating, which occurs due to the spinodal instability of the scalar field. Tachyonic preheating is so efficient that symmetry breaking typically completes within a single oscillation of the field distribution as it rolls towards the minimum of its effective potential. As an application of this theory we consider preheating in the hybrid inflation scenario, including SUSY-motivated F-term and D-term inflationary models. We show that preheating in hybrid inflation is typically tachyonic and the stage of oscillations of a homogeneous component of the scalar fields driving inflation ends after a single oscillation. Our results may also be relevant for the theory of the formation of disoriented chiral condensates in heavy ion collisions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0012142,
title = {Dynamics of Symmetry Breaking and Tachyonic Preheating},
author = {Gary Felder and Juan Garcia-Bellido and Patrick B. Greene and Lev Kofman and Andrei Linde and Igor Tkachev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0012142},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
7 pages, 6 figures. Higher quality figures and computer generated movies in gif format illustrating our results can be found at http://physics.stanford.edu/gfelder/hybrid