Electroweak preheating on a lattice - art. no. 123512

In many inflationary models, a large amount of energy is transferred rapidl y to the long-wavelength matter fields during a period of preheating after inflation. We study how this changes the dynamics of the electroweak phase transition if inflation ends at the electroweak scale. We simulate a classi cal SU(2) x U(1) + Higgs model with initial conditions in which the energy is concentrated in the long-wavelength Higgs modes. With a suitable initial energy density, the electroweak symmetry is restored non-thermally but bro ken again when the fields thermalize. During this symmetry restoration, bar yon number is violated, and we measure its time evolution, pointing out tha t it is highly non-Brownian. This makes it difficult to estimate the genera ted baryon asymmetry.