Entropy production during reheating after inflation and General Relativistic Entropic Acceleration

Abstract

Preheating transforms the coherent, low-entropy energy of the post-inflationary inflaton condensate into a far-from-equilibrium bath of field quanta, and is therefore an intrinsically irreversible process. We quantify that irreversibility directly, by computing the coarse-grained phase-space entropy of the field fluctuations from classical-statistical lattice simulations performed with CosmoLattice. For each field we reconstruct the mode occupation numbers $n_k$ and evaluate $S=\sum_k[(1+n_k)\ln(1+n_k)-n_k\ln n_k]$, following its growth through the different stages of reheating in a self-consistently expanding Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker background. We study three canonical models coupled to a daughter scalar $χ$ through $g^2ϕ^2χ^2$. We discuss the ultraviolet vacuum floor intrinsic to the lattice initial conditions and argue that the produced entropy $ΔS$ is the physically robust diagnostic. The phase-space entropy thus provides a compact, dynamical measure that cleanly separates the resonance-dominated, turbulence-dominated, and spinodal regimes of preheating. We couple this entropy production back into the expansion through the general relativistic entropic acceleration (GREA) framework, modifying the self-consistent scale-factor evolution of CosmoLattice to include the entropic force. The resulting acceleration tracks the heat (the energy transferred to particles) rather than the entropy itself: it is substantial in the tachyonic and quartic-turbulent cases, where an $\mathcal{O}(1)$ fraction of the coherent energy fragments into radiation, but negligible in the resonant $m^2ϕ^2$ model despite its copious entropy production. The slow perturbative reheating that follows generates the bulk of the cosmic entropy ($S_0 \sim10^{88}$) yet drives no appreciable acceleration and shuts off entirely at thermalization.