Preheating with Non-Minimal Kinetic Terms

Abstract: We present the first 3+1-dimensional numerical simulations of scalar fields with non-minimal kinetic terms. As an example, we examine the existence and stability of preheating in the presence of a Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) inflaton coupled to a canonical matter field. The simulations represent the full non-linear theory in the presence of an expanding Universe. We show that parametric resonance in the matter field, along with self-resonance in the inflaton, repopulate the Universe with matter particles as efficiently as in traditional preheating.