Preheating after multifield inflation with nonminimal couplings, II: Resonance Structure

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the resonance structure during preheating in multifield inflation models with nonminimal couplings, revealing how particle production efficiency varies with coupling strength and field trajectories.

Contribution

It provides a detailed Floquet analysis of resonance regions in multifield nonminimally coupled inflation, highlighting differences between adiabatic and isocurvature modes across coupling regimes.

Findings

Efficient particle production occurs at large nonminimal couplings ($\xi_I ightarrow ext{large}$).

Resonance structures depend strongly on wavenumber and coupling in intermediate regimes.

Distinct and more complex resonance behavior for isocurvature modes compared to adiabatic modes.

Abstract

This is the second in a series of papers on preheating in inflationary models comprised of multiple scalar fields coupled nonminimally to gravity. In this paper, we work in the rigid-spacetime approximation and consider field trajectories within the single-field attractor, which is a generic feature of these models. We construct the Floquet charts to find regions of parameter space in which particle production is efficient for both the adiabatic and isocurvature modes, and analyze the resonance structure using analytic and semi-analytic techniques. Particle production in the adiabatic direction is characterized by the existence of an asymptotic scaling solution at large values of the nonminimal couplings, $\xi_I \gg 1$, in which the dominant instability band arises in the long-wavelength limit, for comoving wavenumbers $k \rightarrow 0$. However, the large-$\xi_I$ regime is not reached until $\xi_I \geq {\cal O} (100)$. In the intermediate regime, with $\xi_I \sim {\cal O}(1 - 10)$, the resonance structure depends strongly on wavenumber and couplings. The resonance structure for isocurvature perturbations is distinct and more complicated than its adiabatic counterpart. An intermediate regime, for $\xi_I \sim {\cal O} (1 - 10)$, is again evident. For large values of $\xi_I$, the Floquet chart consists of densely spaced, nearly parallel instability bands, suggesting a very efficient preheating behavior. The increased efficiency arises from features of the nontrivial field-space manifold in the Einstein frame, which itself arises from the fields' nonminimal couplings in the Jordan frame, and has no analogue in models with minimal couplings. Quantitatively, the approach to the large-$\xi_I$ asymptotic solution for isocurvature modes is slower than in the case of the adiabatic modes.