Curvaton preheating revisited

TL;DR

This paper investigates the thermalization process in curvaton preheating using lattice simulations, compares it to inflaton preheating, and finds significant non-Gaussianity in the generated perturbations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of curvaton preheating dynamics with classical lattice simulations and introduces post-processing tools in the PyCOOL program.

Findings

High level of non-Gaussianity in the perturbations

Comparison between curvaton and inflaton preheating dynamics

Demonstration of PyCOOL's post-processing capabilities

Abstract

We study the thermalization process in the self-interacting curvaton preheating scenario. We solve the evolution of the system with classical lattice simulations with a recently released symplectic PyCOOL program during the resonance and the early thermalization periods and compare the results to the inflaton preheating. After this we calculate the generated non-gaussianity with the $\Delta N$ formalism and the separate universe approximation by running a large number of simulations with slightly different initial values. The results indicate a high level of non-gaussianity. We also use this paper to showcase the various post-processing functions included with the PyCOOL program that is available from https://github.com/jtksai/PyCOOL .