Enhanced preheating after multi-field inflation: on the importance of being special

Abstract

We discuss preheating after multi-field inflation in the presence of several preheat matter fields that become light in the vicinity of (but not at) the inflatons' VEV, at distinct extra-species-points (ESP); this setup is motivated by inflationary models that include particle production during inflation, e. g. trapped inflation, grazing ESP encounters or modulated trapping, among others. While de-phasing of inflatons tends to suppress parametric resonance, we find two new effects leading to efficient preheating: particle production during the first in-fall (efficient if many preheat matter fields are present) and a subsequent (narrow) resonance phase (efficient if an ESP happens to be at one of several distinct distances from the inflatons' VEV). Particles produced during the first in-fall are comprised of many species with low occupation number, while the latter are made up of a few species with high occupation number. We provide analytic descriptions of both phases in the absence of back-reaction, which we test numerically. We further perform lattice simulations to investigate the effects of back-reaction. We find resonances to be robust and the most likely cause of inflaton decay in multi-field trapped inflation if ESP distributions are dense.