Interactions between the inflaton and any additional fields can lead to isolated bursts of particle production during inflation (for example from parametric resonance or a phase transition). Inflationary particle production leaves localized features in the spectrum and bispectrum of the observable cosmological fluctuations, via the Infra-Red (IR) cascading mechanism. We focus on a simple prototype interaction $g^2(\varphi -{\varphi }_0{)}^2{\chi }^2$ between the inflaton, $\varphi$, and isoinflaton, $\chi$; extending previous work on this model in two directions. First, we quantify the magnitude of the produced non-Gaussianity by extracting the moments of the probability distribution function from lattice field theory simulations. We argue that the bispectrum feature from particle production might be observable for reasonable values of the coupling, $g^2$. Second, we develop a detailed analytical theory of particle production and IR cascading during inflation, which is in excellent agreement with numerical simulations. Our formalism improves significantly on previous approaches by consistently incorporating both the expansion of the universe and also metric perturbations. We use this new formalism to estimate the shape of the bispectrum from particle production, showing this to be distinguishable from other mechanisms that predict large non-Gaussianity.

• Received 22 June 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.82.106009