Tachyonic instability and dynamics of spontaneous symmetry breaking

By Gary N. Felder, Lev Kofman, Andrei Linde. 2001

279 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Spontaneous symmetry breaking usually occurs due to the tachyonic (spinodal) instability of a scalar field near the top of its effective potential at $\ensuremath{\varphi}=0.$ Naively, one might expect the field $\ensuremath{\varphi}$ to fall from the top of the effective potential and then experience a long stage of oscillations with amplitude $O(v)$ near the minimum of the effective potential at $\ensuremath{\varphi}=v$ until it gives its energy to particles produced during these oscillations. However, it was recently found that the tachyonic instability rapidly converts most of the potential energy $V(0)$ into the energy of colliding classical waves of the scalar field. This conversion, which was called ``tachyonic preheating,'' is so efficient that symmetry breaking typically completes within a single oscillation of the field distribution as it rolls towards the minimum of its effective potential [G. Felder et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 011601 (2001)]. In this paper we give a detailed description of tachyonic preheating and show that the dynamics of this process crucially depends on the shape of the effective potential near its maximum. In the simplest models where $V(\ensuremath{\varphi})\ensuremath{\sim}\ensuremath{-}{m}^{2}{\ensuremath{\varphi}}^{2}/2$ near the maximum, the process occurs solely due to the tachyonic instability, whereas in the theories $\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\lambda}{\ensuremath{\varphi}}^{n}$ with $ng2$ one encounters a combination of the effects of tunneling, tachyonic instability and bubble wall collisions.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eef830bdf840e911820a72715e6d31934d88bfe7

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

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

The ALP miracle: unified inflaton and dark matter (2017, background): “Precisely speaking, even though the inflaton is initially (almost) spatially homogeneous, and it quickly becomes spatially inhomogeneous due to the tachyonic preheating [58, 59].”
Superconformal symmetry, NMSSM, and inflation (2010, background): “A more detailed investigation performed in [45] demonstrated that the process of reheating in this theory is quite complex, being a combination of the perturbative reheating [46], parametric resonance [47], instant preheating [48], and tachyonic preheating [49].”
Modulated fluctuations from hybrid inflation (2004, background): “In hybrid inflation, preheating after inflation has the character of the tachyonic preheating [15], accompanying the symmetry breaking after inflation [16].”
Inflation and string cosmology (2001, background): “’ In [15] it was found that another effect known as tachyonic preheating can lead to even faster decay than parametric resonance.”
Inflationary Cosmology after Planck 2013 (2014, background): “’ In [31] it was found that another effect known as tachyonic preheating can lead to even faster decay than parametric resonance.”
Reheating in Inflationary Cosmology: Theory and Applications (2010, background): “Detailed numerical simulations of tachyonic preheating are given in [40].”