Gravitational Waves from Oscillon Preheating

Understand

Oscillons are long-lived, localized excitations of nonlinear scalar fields which may be copiously produced during preheating after inflation, leading to a possible oscillon-dominated phase in the early Universe.

• For example, this can happen after axion monodromy inflation, on which we run our simulations.
• We investigate the stochastic gravitational wave background associated with an oscillon-dominated phase.
• An isolated oscillon is spherically symmetric and does not radiate gravitational waves, and we show that the flux of gravitational radiation generated between oscillons is also small.