Speaker
Description
In traditional models of preheating, only an order one fraction of energy is transferred from the inflaton to radiation through nonperturbative resonance production immediately after inflation, due to backreaction effects. We propose a particle production mechanism, "spillway preheating", that could improve the depletion of the inflaton energy density by up to four orders of magnitude. The improvement comes from the fast perturbative decays of resonantly produced daughter particles. They act as a "spillway" to drain these daughter particles, reducing their backreaction on the inflaton and keeping the resonant production effective for a longer period. We also show that the fraction of energy density remaining in the inflaton has a simple inverse power-law scaling in the scenario.
