QFT approach to dressed particle processes in preheating and non-perturbative mechanism in kinematically-forbidden regime

Abstract

Abstract We provide a quantum-field theoretic formulation of dressed particle dynamics that systematically includes particle production and scattering/decay processes in the preheating era. Our approach is based on the so-called perturbation theory in the Furry picture, in which coherent background fields (i.e., inflaton and the expanding Universe) are treated non-perturbatively whereas interactions between dressed particles are taken into account perturbatively. As an application, we consider the instant preheating mechanism and compute the number of produced particles explicitly. We find a novel non-perturbative particle-production mechanism, which is kinematically forbidden within the conventional perturbative calculation and gives the dominant contribution in certain parameter regimes, e.g., light daughter particles.