Time evolution of scalar condensate decay

Abstract

A scalar field, which oscillates coherently over the space and decays through production of daughter particles, plays an important role in cosmology. It was recently shown that the parametric-resonance and Feynman-diagrammatic approaches give the same decay rate for a Bosonic daughter particle at a large time duration. We study how the parametric-resonance result approaches to this asymptotic value, by numerically following the time evolution of the phase density of the daughter particle. We see a difference among different instability bands in the narrow-resonance regime. The lowest-order instability band approaches to the Feynman-diagrammatic result in tens of scalar oscillation periods, while the high-order instability bands approach dependently also on a coupling between the scalar and daughter particles. This would infer that the total decay width, to which the lowest-order instability band contributes most dominantly in the perturbation theory, approaches to the Feynman-diagrammatic result also independently of the coupling. To confirm it, we consider a simpler and analytically solvable quantum mechanical model: Rabi models. In the Bosonic Rabi model, the parametric-resonance and Feynman-diagrammatic results agree with each other for all the time. On the other hand, in the Fermionic Rabi model, they disagree at a large time duration. This difference would be attributed to Bose enhancement vs Pauli blocking.