Quenching preheating by light fields

TL;DR

This paper explores how additional light fields, not directly coupled to the background, influence preheating, revealing that their abundance can be significant but may also suppress preheating through backreaction effects.

Contribution

It extends previous work by deriving the occupation number operator including non-linear effects and analyzing how extra light fields can quench preheating.

Findings

Light fields can be abundantly produced via quantum corrections.

Adding many light degrees of freedom can attenuate or quench preheating.

Backreaction effects are crucial in understanding particle production dynamics.

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the role of additional light fields not directly coupled to the background during preheating. We extend our previous study that proved that the production of particles associated with such fields can be abundant due to quantum corrections, even for the massless states. We also obtain the expression for the occupation number operator in terms of interacting fields which includes the non-linear effects important for non-perturbative particle production. We show that adding too many light degrees of freedom without direct interactions with the background might attenuate or even quench preheating as the result of backreaction effects.