Preheating after small-field inflation

International audienceWhereas preheating after chaotic and hybrid inflation models has been abundantly studied in the literature, preheating in small field inflation models, where the curvature of the inflaton potential is negative during inflation, remains less explored. In these models, a tachyonic instability at the end of inflation leads to a succession of exponentially large increases and decreases of the inflaton fluctuations as the inflaton condensate oscillates around the minimum of its potential. The net effect is a competition between low-momentum modes which grow and decrease significantly, and modes with higher momenta which grow less but also decrease less. We develop an analytical description of this process, which is analogous to the quantum mechanical problem of tunneling through a volcano-shaped potential. Depending on the parameters, preheating may be so efficient that it completes in less than one oscillation of the inflaton condensate. Preheating after small field inflation may also be followed by a long matter-dominated stage before the Universe thermalizes, depending on the energy scale of inflation and the details of the inflaton interactions. Finally, another feature of these models is that the spectrum of the inflaton fluctuations at the end of preheating may be peaked around the Hubble scale. In fact, because preheating starts when the second slow-roll parameter |eta| becomes of order unity while the first slow-roll parameter ε is still much smaller than 1, the Universe is still inflating during preheating and the modes amplified by the initial tachyonic instability leave the Hubble radius. This may lead to an abundant production of primordial black holes and gravitational waves with frequencies today which are naturally small enough to fall into the range accessible by high-sensitivity interferometric experiments