Reheating in the Presence of Noise

Explosive particle production due to parametric resonance is a crucial feature of reheating in inflationary cosmology. Coherent oscillations of the inflaton field act as a periodically varying mass in the evolution equation for matter fields which couple to the inflaton. This in turn results in the parametric resonance instability. Thermal and quantum noise will lead to a nonperiodic perturbation in the mass. We study the resulting equation for the evolution of matter fields and demonstrate that noise (at least if it is temporally uncorrelated) will increase the rate of particle production. We also estimate the limits on the magnitude of the noise for which the resonant behavior is qualitatively unchanged.Comment: 26 pages, 2 figures, uses LATE

Chaos and a Resonance Mechanism for Structure Formation in Inflationary Models

We exhibit a resonance mechanism of amplification of density perturbations in inflationary mo-dels, using a minimal set of ingredients (an effective cosmological constant, a scalar field minimally coupled to the gravitational field and matter), common to most models in the literature of inflation. This mechanism is based on the structure of homoclinic cylinders, emanating from an unstable periodic orbit in the neighborhood of a saddle-center critical point, present in the phase space of the model. The cylindrical structure induces oscillatory motions of the scales of the universe whenever the orbit visits the neighborhood of the saddle-center, before the universe enters a period of exponential expansion. The oscillations of the scale functions produce, by a resonance mechanism, the amplification of a selected wave number spectrum of density perturbations, and can explain the hierarchy of scales observed in the actual universe. The transversal crossings of the homoclinic cylinders induce chaos in the dynamics of the model, a fact intimately connected to the resonance mechanism occuring immediately before the exit to inflation.Comment: 4 pages. This essay received an Honorable Mention from the Gravity Research Foundation, 1998-Ed. To appear in Mod. Phys. Lett.

Micro-universes and "strong black holes": a purely geometric approach to elementary particles

We present here a panoramic view of our unified, bi--scale theory of gravitational and strong interactions [which is mathematically analogous to the last version of N.Rosen's bi--metric theory; and yields physical results similar to strong gravity's]. This theory, developed during the last 15 years, is purely geometrical in nature, adopting the methods of General Relativity for the description of hadron structure and strong interactions. In particular, hadrons are associated with `` strong black--holes'', from the external point of view, and with ``micro--universes'', from the internal point of view. Among the results herein presented, let us mention the derivation: (i) of confinement and (ii) asymptotic freedom for the hadron constituents; (iii) of the Yukawa behaviour for the strong potential at the static limit; (iv) of the strong coupling ``constant'', and (v) of mesonic mass spectra