False Vacuum Decay after Inflation

Abstract

Inflation is terminated by a non-equilibrium process which finally leads to a thermal state. We study the onset of this transition in a class of hybrid inflation models. The exponential growth of tachyonic modes leads to decoherence and spinodal decomposition. We compute the decoherence time, the spinodal time, the size of the formed domains and the homogeneous classical fields within a single domain.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Spectral function $f_k(t)$ of the variance $\langle \sigma^2(t) \rangle_r^{1/2}$. Thick lines correspond to numerical solutions; the thin line denotes an approximate analytical solution.
• Figure 2: Growth of the variance $\langle \sigma^2(t) \rangle_r$ with time. Full and dashed lines correspond to numerical and analytical results, respectively. The horizontal line denotes the true vacuum $\langle \sigma^2 \rangle_r =2 M_G^2$.
• Figure 3: Decoherence time for tachyonic modes as function of momentum.
• Figure 4: Correlation function of the smeared $\sigma$-field.