Post-Inflationary Curvature Perturbations

Abstract

Curvature perturbations generated after the end of inflation are estimated for a generic multi-field inflationary potential. The curvature perturbations are generated by conversion of inflationary isocurvature perturbations, similar to curvaton and inhomogeneous reheating scenarios. During inflation, the trajectory along which the fields are rolling down will fluctuate. When inflation ends, the fields enter the oscillatory phase along different directions in different parts of the universe. Different oscillatory trajectories can have different effective equations of state and reheating rates, so that different parts of the universe will evolve differently. This translates the isocurvature perturbations into the curvature perturbations. If all light fields make similar contributions to the potential energy, the postinflationary curvature perturbations are much smaller than the standard inflationary curvature perturbations. But if different light fields make very different contributions to the potential energy, the postinflationary curvature perturbations can exceed the inflationary perturbations. The characteristic feature of postinflationary perturbations is non-Gaussianity $\sim \pm 1$.