Preheating in a DBI Inflation Model

Abstract

We study the preheating process in a model of DBI inflation with a DBI-type inflaton coupling to a canonical entropy field. At the end of inflation, the inflaton field oscillates around its vacuum which can arise from an infrared cutoff parameter on the warp factor and correspondingly the evolution of its fluctuations can be approximately described by a generalized Hill's equation in third order. We study the field fluctuations numerically and show that they could grow exponentially since the instability bands commonly exist in the DBI models if the amplitudes of background oscillations are of order or larger than the cutoff parameter. Our numerical result also reveals that the particle excitation of the matter field is more dramatic than that in usual case since the parametric resonance lasts longer when the effect of a warp factor is taken into account. Therefore, we conclude that the preheating process in the model of DBI inflation could be more efficient than that in standard inflation models.