Spillway preheating

In traditional models only an order one fraction of energy is transferred from the inflaton to radiation through nonperturbative resonance production in preheating immediately after inflation, due to backreaction effects. We propose a particle production mechanism 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. Thus we dub the scenario spillway preheating. We also show that the fraction of energy density remaining in the inflaton has a simple inverse power-law scaling in the scenario. In general, spillway preheating is a much more efficient energy dissipation mechanism, which may have other applications in model building for particle physics.

Automated summary

The proposed spillway preheating mechanism can more efficiently dissipate the energy density of the inflaton, using fast perturbative decays of resonantly produced daughter particles to act as a spillway, reducing their backreaction on the inflaton. This leads to a more effective resonant production and a simple inverse power-law scaling in the fraction of energy density remaining in the inflaton.