Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - The linear regime of tachyonic preheating
AU - Koivunen, Niko
AU - Tomberg, Eemeli
AU - Veermäe, Hardi
PY - 2022/7/18
Y1 - 2022/7/18
N2 - Tachyonic preheating is realized when the inflaton repeatedly returns to a convex region of the potential during the post-inflationary oscillating phase. This will induce a strong tachyonic instability and lead to a rapid fragmentation of the coherent field that can complete within a fraction of an e-fold. In this paper, we study the linear regime of this process in a model-independent way. To this purpose, we construct simplified models that provide an analytic Floquet theoretic description of mode growth. This approach captures the essential features of well-motivated tachyonic preheating scenarios, including scenarios in which the inflaton is part of a larger scalar multiplet. We show that tachyonic preheating is efficient if the field excursions are sub-Planckian, can produce gravitational waves in the frequency range of current and future gravitational wave interferometers, and can be consistent with any experimentally allowed tensor-to-scalar ratio.
AB - Tachyonic preheating is realized when the inflaton repeatedly returns to a convex region of the potential during the post-inflationary oscillating phase. This will induce a strong tachyonic instability and lead to a rapid fragmentation of the coherent field that can complete within a fraction of an e-fold. In this paper, we study the linear regime of this process in a model-independent way. To this purpose, we construct simplified models that provide an analytic Floquet theoretic description of mode growth. This approach captures the essential features of well-motivated tachyonic preheating scenarios, including scenarios in which the inflaton is part of a larger scalar multiplet. We show that tachyonic preheating is efficient if the field excursions are sub-Planckian, can produce gravitational waves in the frequency range of current and future gravitational wave interferometers, and can be consistent with any experimentally allowed tensor-to-scalar ratio.
KW - inflation
KW - physics of the early universe
U2 - 10.1088/1475-7516/2022/07/028
DO - 10.1088/1475-7516/2022/07/028
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85134995258
VL - 2022
JO - Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
JF - Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
SN - 1475-7516
IS - 7
M1 - 028
ER -