Particle production during and after inflation

by Dr Thorsten Battefeld (Goettingen University)

Wednesday 5 Dec 2012, 11:30 → 12:30 Europe/Zurich

4/2-011 - TH common room (CERN)

Additional light degrees of freedom at certain locations in field space (ESPs) are ubiquitous in moduli spaces and can have interesting effects during and after inflation: particle production at such locations and the associated back-reaction can yield additional contributions to correlation functions of curvature fluctuations, affect the speed of the inflaton(s) (trapped inflation) and drastically alter the nature of preheating. In this talk, I first examine a single grazing ESP encounter as a warm-up, before discussing multi-field preheating at ESPs in the vicinity (but not at) the VEV of the inflatons (as in trapped inflation). The latter can be efficient if ESPs are dense, and/or if ESPs happen to be close to special locations due to prolonged narrow resonances that are absent if preheat matter fields become light at the VEV of the inflatons.