Frustration of resonant preheating by exotic kinetic terms

TL;DR

This paper investigates how exotic kinetic terms, inspired by theories like generalized uncertainty principles and Dirac-Born-Infeld models, suppress parametric resonance during early universe preheating, with numerical evidence supporting this effect.

Contribution

It demonstrates that exotic kinetic modifications universally inhibit parametric resonance in preheating, extending previous models to include nonlinear self-interactions.

Findings

Exotic kinetic terms cause finite-time shutdown of resonance.

Nonlinearity persists in inhomogeneous matter in 1+1 dimensions.

Resonance frustration is robust against spatial inhomogeneities.

Abstract

We study the effects of exotic kinetic terms on parametric resonance during the preheating epoch of the early universe. Specifically, we consider modifications to the action of ordinary matter fields motivated by generalized uncertainty principles, polymer quantization, as well as Dirac-Born-Infeld and k-essence models. To leading order in an "exotic physics" scale, the equations of motion derived from each of these models have the same algebraic form involving a nonlinear self-interaction in the matter sector. Neglecting spatial dependence, we show that the nonlinearity effectively shuts down the parametric resonance after a finite time period. We find numeric evidence that the frustration of parametric resonance persists to spatially inhomogenous matter in $(1+1)$--dimensions.