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Gravitational waves from oscillon preheating

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Abstract

Oscillons are long-lived, localized excitations of nonlinear scalar fields which may be copiously produced during preheating after inflation, leading to a possible oscillon dominated phase in the early Universe. For example, this can happen after axion monodromy inflation, on which we run our simulations. We investigate the stochastic gravitational wave background associated with an oscillon-dominated phase. An isolated oscillon is spherically symmetric and does not radiate gravitational waves, and we show that the flux of gravitational radiation generated between oscillons is also small. However, a significant stochastic gravitational wave background may be generated during preheating itself (i.e, when oscillons are forming), and in this case the characteristic size of the oscillons is imprinted on the gravitational wave power spectrum, which has multiple, distinct peaks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, U.K.

    Shuang-Yong Zhou, Edmund J. Copeland, Zong-Gang Mou & Paul M. Saffin

  2. SISSA, Via Bonomea 265, 34136, Trieste, Italy

    Shuang-Yong Zhou

  3. INFN, Sezione di Trieste, Trieste, Italy

    Shuang-Yong Zhou

  4. Department of Physics, University of Auckland, Private Bag, 92019, Auckland, New Zealand

    Richard Easther

  5. Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Argonne National Laboratory, 9700 S. Cass Ave., Lemont, IL, 60439, U.S.A.

    Hal Finkel

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  1. Shuang-Yong Zhou
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  2. Edmund J. Copeland
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Correspondence to Shuang-Yong Zhou.

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Zhou, SY., Copeland, E.J., Easther, R. et al. Gravitational waves from oscillon preheating. J. High Energ. Phys. 2013, 26 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2013)026

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