Curvaton preheating revisited

Abstract

We study the thermalization process in the self-interacting curvaton preheating scenario. We solve the evolution of the system with classical lattice simulations with a recently released symplectic PyCOOL program during the resonance and the early thermalization periods and compare the results to the inflaton preheating. After this we calculate the generated non-gaussianity with the $\Delta N$ formalism and the separate universe approximation by running a large number of simulations with slightly different initial values. The results indicate a high level of non-gaussianity. We also use this paper to showcase the various post-processing functions included with the PyCOOL program that is available from https://github.com/jtksai/PyCOOL .