Thermal blocking of preheating

Understand

The parametric resonance responsible for preheating after inflation will end when self-interactions of the resonating field and interactions of this field with secondary degrees of freedom become important.

• In many cases, the effect may be quantified in terms of an effective mass and the resulting shifting out of the spectrum of the strongest resonance band.
• In certain curvaton models, such thermal blocking can even occur before preheating has begun, delaying or even preventing the decay of the curvaton.
• We investigate numerically to what extent this thermal blocking is realised in a specific scenario, and whether the effective mass is well approximated by the perturbative leading order thermal mass.