Preheating curvaton perturbations

We discuss the potentially important rôle played by preheating in certain variants of the curvaton mechanism in which isocurvature perturbations of a D-flat (and F-flat) direction become converted to curvature perturbations during reheating. We discover that parametric resonance of the isocurvature components amplifies the superhorizon fluctuations by a significant amount. As an example of these effects we develop a particle physics motivated model which involves hybrid inflation with the waterfall field N being responsible for generating the μ term, the right-handed neutrino mass scale, and the Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking scale. The rôle of the curvaton field can be played either by usual Higgs field, or the lightest right-handed sneutrino. Our new results show that it is possible to achieve the correct curvature perturbations for initial values of the curvaton fields of order the weak scale. In this model we show that the prediction for the spectral index of the final curvature perturbation only depends on the mass of the curvaton during inflation, where consistency with current observational data requires the ratio of this mass to the Hubble constant to be ⩽ 0.3.