Aspects of wave turbulence in preheating

Full text: In the simplest chaotic inflationary model, the Universe has an exponentially fast expansion phase driven by a single scalar field. After inflation, the preheating phase takes place. This phase is characterized when the inflaton performs coherent oscillations about its minimum value and is followed by a huge production of particles. In other terms, there is an energy transfer to small inhomogeneous fluctuations of the inflaton field. The long term behavior ends up in a thermalized universe. In this paper, we have studied numerically the late stages of preheating in a model with a quartic potential V (ϕ) = ¼λ ϕ4. We have considered the universe as a squared box with periodic boundary conditions, and applied the collocation method to integrate the field equations. We have shown that the dynamics of the inflaton together with its initially small fluctuations is extremely rich. In the first stage, the parametric resonance is responsible for the exponential growth of some modes. In the sequence, the back reaction of these resonant modes triggers the transfer of energy to other modes or fluctuations. Subsequently, the transfer of energy from the inflaton to thermalize the universe is typical of a turbulent system. In the last part, we have considered the back reaction of the inflaton field in the expansion of the universe. (author)