Primordial black hole production due to preheating - art. no. 021301

During the preheating process at the end of inflation the amplification of field fluctuations can lead to the amplification of curvature perturbations . If the curvature perturbations on small scales are sufficiently large, pr imordial black holes (PBHs) will be overproduced. In this paper we study PB H production in the two-field preheating model with quadratic inflaton pote ntial. We show that for many values of the inflaton mass m, and coupling g, small scale perturbations will be amplified sufficiently, before back reac tion can shut off preheating, so that PBHs will be overproduced during the subsequent radiation dominated era.