Lattice study of classical inflaton decay
Abstract
We study numerically the decay of the inflaton by solving the full non-linear equations of motion on the lattice. We confirm that parametric resonance is effective in transferring energy from the inflaton to a scalar field as long as the self-interactions of the second field are very small. However, in the very broad resonance case (q>>1) the decay rate is limited by scatterings, which significantly slows down the decay. We also find that the inflaton cannot decay via parametric resonance into a scalar field with moderate self-interactions. This means that the preheating stage may be completely absent in many natural inflationary models.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.hep-ph/9610400,
title = {Lattice study of classical inflaton decay},
author = {Tomislav Prokopec and Thomas G. Roos},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/9610400},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
12 pages LaTeX with standard RevTex macros, uses epsf.sty. 7 postscript figures (included). No changes. Replaced to correct a problem with the figures