Gravitational waves in preheating

Abstract

We study the evolution of gravitational waves through the preheating era that follows inflation. The oscillating inflaton drives parametric resonant growth of scalar field fluctuations, and although super-Hubble tensor modes are not strongly amplified, they do carry an imprint of preheating. This is clearly seen in the Weyl tensor, which provides a covariant description of gravitational waves.

Comments: 8 pages, 8 figures, Revtex