Theory and numerics of gravitational waves from preheating after inflation

By J. Dufaux, A. Bergman, Gary N. Felder, Lev Kofman, Jean-Philippe Uzan. 2007

277 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Preheating after inflation involves large, time-dependent field inhomogeneities, which act as a classical source of gravitational radiation. The resulting spectrum might be probed by direct detection experiments if inflation occurs at a low enough energy scale. In this paper, we develop a theory and algorithm to calculate, analytically and numerically, the spectrum of energy density in gravitational waves produced from an inhomogeneous background of stochastic scalar fields in an expanding universe. We derive some generic analytical results for the emission of gravity waves by stochastic media of random fields, which can test the validity/accuracy of numerical calculations. We contrast our method with other numerical methods in the literature, and then we apply it to preheating after chaotic inflation. In this case, we are able to check analytically our numerical results, which differ significantly from previous works. We discuss how the gravity-wave spectrum builds up with time and find that the amplitude and the frequency of its peak depend in a relatively simple way on the characteristic spatial scale amplified during preheating. We then estimate the peak frequency and amplitude of the spectrum produced in two models of preheating after hybrid inflation, which for some parameters may be relevant for gravity-wave interferometric experiments.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4af5a084ee62c06a4b258541ef1c953b86e5c416

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Citations in the corpus

Gravitational wave production by collisions: more bubbles (2008, background): “Notice also that a flatter spectrum simplifies the distinction from other sources of stochastic gravitational waves, such as turbulence [21, 22, 23, 24] or preheating after inflation [25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30].”
Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, background): “…coherent processes such as preheating transform the energy into coherent classical motions that can generate backgrounds on the order of 10−3 or more of the total energy density (Dufaux et al., 2007, 2009, Easther and Lim, 2006, Garcia-Bellido and Figueroa, 2007, Khlebnikov and Tkachev, 1997).”
Reconstructing the spectral shape of a stochastic gravitational wave background with LISA (2019, background): “a kination dominated phase [46–50], non-perturbative particle production phenomena [51–62], oscillon dynamics [63–67], strong first order phase transitions [68–81], or cosmic defect networks [82–93].”
Challenges and opportunities of gravitational-wave searches at MHz to GHz frequencies (2020, background): “The maximum value of today’s amplitude for these processes, inferred from numerical simulations, is in the range XGW;0 ’ ð10 13 10 10Þ (Antusch et al. 2017, 2018a; Amin et al. 2018), see Dufaux et al. (2007) for a discussion on how to compute the GW amplitude.”
Particle production during inflation and gravitational waves detectable by ground-based interferometers (2011, background): “This result agrees with [24], where it was shown that in the Minkowsky limit, H → 0, a gas of adiabatically evolving scalars does not generate any gravitational waves.”