From Wires to Cosmology

Abstract

We provide a statistical framework for characterizing stochastic particle production in the early universe via a precise correspondence to current conduction in wires with impurities. Our approach is particularly useful when the microphysics is uncertain and the dynamics are complex, but only coarse-grained information is of interest. We study scenarios with multiple interacting fields and derive the evolution of the particle occupation numbers from a Fokker-Planck equation. At late times, the typical occupation numbers grow exponentially which is the analog of Anderson localization for disordered wires. Some statistical features of the occupation numbers show hints of universality in the limit of a large number of interactions and/or a large number of fields. For test cases, excellent agreement is found between our analytic results and numerical simulations.

v3: minor changes and references added; matches published version in JCAP

References in corpus (12)

• Nonperturbative Dynamics Of Reheating After Inflation: A Review
• Features and New Physical Scales in Primordial Observables: Theory and Observation
• Mass hierarchies and non-decoupling in multi-scalar field dynamics
• Trapped Inflation
• Multifield Dynamics of Higgs Inflation
• The Decay of the Standard Model Higgs after Inflation
• Multi-field Inflation with a Random Potential
• Disorder in the Early Universe
• Multi-field formulation of gravitational particle production after inflation
• Anderson localization of one-dimensional hybrid particles
• Enhanced Preheating after Multi-Field Inflation: On the Importance of being Special
• Generating Functionals for Quantum Field Theories with Random Potentials

Cited by in corpus (40)

• Self-resonance after inflation: oscillons, transients and radiation domination
• Violent Preheating in Inflation with Nonminimal Coupling
• Productive Interactions: heavy particles and non-Gaussianity
• Preheating after Multifield Inflation with Nonminimal Couplings, I: Covariant Formalism and Attractor Behavior
• Preheating after multifield inflation with nonminimal couplings, III: Dynamical spacetime results
• On the violent preheating in the mixed Higgs-$R^2$ inflationary model
• Preheating after multifield inflation with nonminimal couplings, II: Resonance Structure
• Primordial Black Holes Arise When The Inflaton Falls
• Primordial non-Gaussianity from ultra slow-roll Galileon inflation
• Catastrophic Production of Slow Gravitinos
• Dynamical Constraints on RG Flows and Cosmology
• Universality and scaling in multi-field $\alpha$-attractor preheating
• CMB from EFT
• The Generalized OTOC from Supersymmetric Quantum Mechanics: Study of Random Fluctuations from Eigenstate Representation of Correlation Functions
• Higher N-point function data analysis techniques for heavy particle production and WMAP results
• Manyfield Inflation in Random Potentials
• Exponential Hierarchies from Anderson Localization in Theory Space
• Toward an Effective Field Theory Approach to Reheating
• Quantum Out-of-Equilibrium Cosmology
• Seven Lessons from Manyfield Inflation in Random Potentials
• Multifield Stochastic Particle Production: Beyond a Maximum Entropy Ansatz
• Pole N-flation
• Resonant particle production during inflation: a full analytical study
• The phenomenology of trapped inflation
• Explosive Axion Production from Saxion
• Quantum randomness in the Sky
• Curvature Perturbations From Stochastic Particle Production During Inflation
• Cosmological Particle Production and Pairwise Hotspots on the CMB
• Stochastic Particle Production in a de Sitter Background
• The Cosmological OTOC: A New Proposal for Quantifying Auto-Correlated Random Non-Chaotic Primordial Fluctuations
• Inflation as an Information Bottleneck - A strategy for identifying universality classes and making robust predictions
• Gravitino Problem in Inflation Driven by Inflaton-Polonyi Kähler Coupling
• Reconstructing the EFT of Inflation from Cosmological Data
• The Gravitino Swampland Conjecture
• Randomness-Assisted Exponential Hierarchies
• Stochastic particle creation: from the dynamical Casimir effect to cosmology
• Cherenkov in the Sky: Measuring the Sound Speed of Primordial Scalar Fluctuations
• Enlarging the Space of Viable Inflation Models: A Slingshot Mechanism
• More on scattering processes of dressed particles with a time-dependent mass
• Shortcuts to adiabaticity, unexciting backgrounds, and reflectionless potentials