More on loops in reheating: non-gaussianities and tensor power spectrum

Abstract

We consider the single field chaotic m2ϕ2 inflationary model with a period of preheating, where the inflaton decays to another scalar field χ in the parametric resonance regime. In a recent work, one of us has shown that the χ modes circulating in the loops during preheating notably modify the ⟨ζζ⟩ correlation function. We first rederive this result using a different gauge condition hence reconfirm that superhorizon ζ modes are affected by the loops in preheating. Further, we examine how χ loops give rise to non-gaussianity and affect the tensor perturbations. For that, all cubic and some higher order interactions involving two χ fields are determined and their contribution to the non-gaussianity parameter fNL and the tensor power spectrum are calculated at one loop. Our estimates for these corrections show that while a large amount of non-gaussianity can be produced during reheating, the tensor power spectrum receive moderate corrections. We observe that the loop quantum effects increase with more χ fields circulating in the loops indicating that the perturbation theory might be broken down. These findings demonstrate that the loop corrections during reheating are significant and they must be taken into account for precision inflationary cosmology.