Post-inflationary preheating with weak coupling

Particle production in the background of an external classical oscillating field is a key process describing the stage of preheating after inflation. For sufficiently strong couplings between the inflaton and matter fields, this process is known to proceed non-perturbatively. Parametric resonance plays crucial role for bosonic fields in this case, and the evolution of the occupation numbers for fermions is non-perturbative as well. In the Minkowski space, parametric resonance for bosons and non-perturbative effects for fermions would still persist even in the case of weak coupling. In particular, the energy density of created bosons would grow exponentially with time. However, the situation is quite different in the expanding universe. We give a simple demonstration how the conditions of the expanding universe, specifically, redshift of the field modes, lead to the usual perturbative expressions for particle production by an oscillating inflaton in the case of weak couplings. The results that we obtain are relevant and fully applicable to the Starobinsky model of inflation.Comment: 17 pages; Phys. Lett. B 733, 201