Gauge-preheating and the end of axion inflation

By Peter Adshead, John T. Giblin Jr., T. Scully, Evangelos Sfakianakis. 2015

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the onset of the reheating epoch at the end of axion-driven inflation where the axion is coupled to an Abelian, U(1), gauge field via a Chern-Simons interaction term. We focus primarily on m2ϕ2 inflation and explore the possibility that preheating can occur for a range of coupling values consistent with recent observations and bounds on the overproduction of primordial black holes. We find that for a wide range of parameters preheating is efficient. In certain cases the inflaton transfers all of its energy to the gauge fields within a few oscillations. In most cases, we find that the gauge fields on sub-horizon scales end preheating in an unpolarized state due to the existence of strong rescattering between the inflaton and gauge-field modes. We also present a preliminary study of an axion monodromy model coupled to U(1) gauge fields, seeing a similarly efficient preheating behavior as well as indications that the coupling strength has an effect on the creation of oscillons.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/65c477e419a5d4034dc42f5bc6d7697ba56a0764

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Magnetogenesis from axion inflation (2016, methodology): “The magnetic field amplitude is largely insensitive to the exact value of the axion-gauge coupling, as long as it supports instantaneous preheating [61] and is not too large, as to lead to prolonged inflation due to non-linear “trapping” of the axion.”
Vector dark matter production at the end of inflation (2018, background): “3 In this range of α/f , preheating into dark photons is not efficient [21] implying that during the inflaton oscillations only a negligible fraction of its energy density is transferred to the dark photon.”