Theory of self-resonance after inflation. II. Quantum mechanics and particle-antiparticle asymmetry

• Main Authors: Karouby, Johanna (Contributor), Spitzer, William G. (Contributor), Becerra, Juana C. (Contributor), Li, Lanqing (Contributor), Hertzberg, Mark Peter (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Physical Society, 2015-01-06T19:29:21Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 We further develop a theory of self-resonance after inflation in a large class of models involving multiple scalar fields. We concentrate on inflaton potentials that carry an internal symmetry, but also analyze weak breaking of this symmetry. This is the second part of a two-part series of papers. Here in Part 2 we develop an understanding of the resonance structure from the underlying many-particle quantum mechanics. We begin with a small-amplitude analysis, which obtains the central resonant wave numbers, and relate it to perturbative processes. We show that the dominant resonance structure is determined by (i) the nonrelativistic scattering of many quantum particles and (ii) the application of Bose-Einstein statistics to the adiabatic and isocurvature modes, as introduced in Part 1 [M. P. Hertzberg et al., Phys. Rev. D 90, 123528 (2014)]. Other resonance structures are understood in terms of annihilations and decays. We set up Bunch-Davies vacuum initial conditions during inflation and track the evolution of modes including Hubble expansion. In the case of a complex inflaton carrying an internal U(1) symmetry, we show that when the isocurvature instability is active, the inflaton fragments into separate regions of ϕ-particles and anti-ϕ-particles. We then introduce a weak breaking of the U(1) symmetry; this can lead to baryogenesis, as shown by some of us recently [M. P. Hertzberg and J. Karouby, Phys. Lett. B 737, 34 (2014); Phys. Rev. D 89, 063523 (2014)]. Then using our results, we compute corrections to the particle-antiparticle asymmetry from this preheating era.