Charge separation in reheating after cosmological inflation

New aspects of parametrically resonant heating of a relativistic scalar O(2)-symmetric self-interacting field are presented. This process is a candidate for reheating at the end of the early-universe epoch of inflation. Although a model with a fully symmetric ground state is used, transient, metastable spontaneous symmetry breaking can be observed. This manifests itself in the form of persistent regimes of opposite and, inside these, uniform charge overdensities separated by thin lines and walls similar to topological defects, in two and three spatial dimensions, respectively. The configuration is found to correspond to a non-thermal fixed point of the underlying dynamic equations for correlation functions which prevents thermalisation over an extended period of time. Our results establish a link between wave-turbulent phenomena and the appearance of quasi-topological defects in inflaton dynamics.