Phase Transitions at Preheating

Abstract

Symmetry restoration processes during the non-equilibrium stage of ``preheating'' after inflation is studied. It is shown that symmetry restoration is very efficient when the majority of created particles are concentrated at energies much smaller than the temperature $T$ in equilibrium. The strength of symmetry restoration measured in terms of the equivalent temperature can exceed $T$ by many orders of magnitude. In some models the effect can be equivalent to that if the temperature of instant reheating would be close to the Planck scale. This can have an important impact on GUT and axion models.