Non-Gaussianity from massless preheating

Abstract

Preheating can convert superhorizon fluctuations of light scalar fields present at the end of inflation into observable density perturbations. We show in detail how lattice field theory simulations and the separate universes approximation can be used to calculate these perturbations and make predictions for the nonlinearity parameter fNL . We also present a simple approximation scheme that can reproduce these results analytically. Applying these methods to the massless preheating model, we determine the parameter values that are ruled out by too high levels of non-Gaussianity.

26 pages, 9 figures, 1 table; erratum added