Oscillons after Inflation

Amin, Mustafa A.; Easther, Richard; Finkel, Hal; Flauger, Raphael; Hertzberg, Mark P.

doi:10.1103/physrevlett.108.241302

Cited by 265 publications

(327 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Oscillons can be produced during preheating after different models of inflation [7][8][9][10][11], as well as in various types of field theories [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. In [20], it has been shown that they form when a scalar field oscillates in a potential that opens up away from the minimum, i.e.…”

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confidence: 99%

Gravitational Waves from Oscillons after Inflation

2017

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We investigate the production of gravitational waves during preheating after inflation in the common case of field potentials that are asymmetric around the minimum. In particular, we study the impact of oscillons, comparatively long lived and spatially localized regions where a scalar field (e.g. the inflaton) oscillates with large amplitude. Contrary to a previous study, which considered a symmetric potential, we find that oscillons in asymmetric potentials associated with a phase transition can generate a pronounced peak in the spectrum of gravitational waves, that largely exceeds the linear preheating spectrum. We discuss the possible implications of this enhanced amplitude of gravitational waves. For instance, for low scale inflation models, the contribution from the oscillons can strongly enhance the observation prospects at current and future gravitational wave detectors.Introduction: Inflation is a very successful paradigm for early universe cosmology. The accelerated expansion can solve the horizon and flatness problems, while the quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field provide the seed for structure in the universe. After inflation, the potential energy of the inflaton is transferred to a thermal bath of the matter species present in the universe today in a process called reheating. The early stage of reheating, referred to as preheating, is often governed by non-linear dynamics of the inflaton field and other fields coupled to it, typically resulting in inhomogeneous field configurations. A generic consequence of preheating is the production of a stochastic background of gravitational waves (GW) [1, 2].

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confidence: 99%

Gravitational Waves from Oscillons after Inflation

2017

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“…[11,23,24,[28][29][30][31][32]) indicate that the emergence of ordered structures is a very general feature of preheating for potentials that support them. Their presence delays thermodynamic equipartition since they "lock" long wavelength modes for a long time.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transition to order after hilltop inflation

Gleiser

Graham

2014

Phys. Rev. D

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We investigate the rich nonlinear dynamics during the end of hilltop inflation by numerically solving the coupled Klein-Gordon-Friedmann equations in a expanding universe. In particular, we search for coherent, nonperturbative configurations that may emerge due to the combination of nontrivial couplings between the fields and resonant effects from the cosmological expansion. We couple a massless field to the inflaton to investigate its effect on the existence and stability of coherent configurations and the effective equation of state at reheating. For parameters consistent with data from the Planck and WMAP satellites, and for a wide range of couplings between the inflaton and the massless field, we identify a transition from disorder to order characterized by emergent oscillonlike configurations. We verify that these configurations can contribute a maximum of roughly 30% of the energy density in the universe. At late times their contribution to the energy density drops to about 3%, but they remain long-lived on cosmological time-scales, being stable throughout our simulations. Cosmological oscillon emergence is described using a new measure of order in field theory known as relative configurational entropy.

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“…As in [16], we add a small U (1) breaking term to generate the inflaton/anti-inflaton asymmetry. While we focus on this particular model for concreteness, we expect our qualitative results to hold for a much broader class of "flatter than quadratic" potentials because of the results in [5].…”

Section: Arxiv:14081811v3 [Hep-ph] 4 Dec 2014mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The end of inflation and reheating can be complex, with nonlinear dynamics giving rise to a number of distinctly non-perturbative phenomena such as inflaton fragmentation, explosive particle production, defect formation etc. [3][4][5]. It also has a number of challenging but important observational consequences (see for example [6]).…”

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confidence: 99%

End of inflation, oscillons, and matter-antimatter asymmetry

Lozanov

Amin

2014

Phys. Rev. D

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The dynamics at the end of inflation can generate an asymmetry between particles and antiparticles of the inflaton field. This asymmetry can be transferred to baryons via decays, generating a baryon asymmetry in our Universe. We explore this idea in detail for a complex inflaton governed by an observationally consistent -"flatter than quadratic"-potential with a weakly broken global U (1) symmetry. We find that most of the inflaton asymmetry is locked in non-topological soliton like configurations (oscillons) produced copiously at the end of inflation. These solitons eventually decay into baryons and generate the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry for a range of model parameters. Through a combination of three dimensional lattice simulations and a detailed linearized analysis, we show how the inflaton asymmetry depends on the fragmentation, the magnitude of the symmetry breaking term and initial conditions at the end of inflation. We discuss the final decay into baryons, but leave a detailed analysis of the inhomogeneous annihilation, reheating and thermalization to future work.As part of our work, we pay particular attention to generating multifield initial conditions for the field fluctuations (including metric perturbations) at the end of inflation for lattice simulations. CONTENTS

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Oscillons after Inflation

Cited by 265 publications

References 37 publications

Gravitational Waves from Oscillons after Inflation

Gravitational Waves from Oscillons after Inflation

Transition to order after hilltop inflation

End of inflation, oscillons, and matter-antimatter asymmetry

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