QFT approach to dressed particle processes in preheating and non-perturbative mechanism in kinematically-forbidden regime

Abstract: We provide a quantum-field theoretic formulation of dressed particle dynamics that systematically include particle production and scattering/decay processes in the preheating era. Our approach is based on the so-called perturbation theory in the Furry picture, in which coherent background fields (i.e., inflaton and the expanding Universe) are treated non-perturbatively whereas interactions between dressed particles are taken into account perturbatively. As application, we consider the instant preheating mechanism and compute the number of produced particles explicitly, assuming that the coherent fields are adiabatic. We find a novel non-perturbative particle-production mechanism, which is kinematically forbidden within the conventional perturbative calculation and produces particles exponentially efficiently than the perturbative one does.