Alexei Starobinsky investigated how energy stored in an oscillating inflaton can become particles after cosmic inflation. With Lev Kofman and Andrei Linde, he developed a treatment of preheating through parametric resonance in an expanding cosmological background.
Repeated oscillations can amplify a coupled scalar field much more rapidly than independent perturbative decays would suggest. The calculation follows both the growth of the produced particles and their backreaction on the oscillating field. That feedback, together with scattering, changes and eventually terminates the resonance.[ref]
Towards the Theory of Reheating After Inflation by Lev Kofman and others. Abstract: particle production, broad resonance, expansion, backreaction and rescattering
Portrait of Alexei Starobinsky
. Melirius; photograph taken 10 March 2014 at the Zeldovich-100 conference in Minsk; existing crop from Zeldovich-100 participants.jpg. CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Source.
Alexei Starobinsky is a prominent Russian theoretical physicist renowned for his contributions to cosmology and quantum field theory. He is particularly well known for his work on the early universe, including the concept of cosmic inflation. In the early 1980s, Starobinsky proposed a model of inflation that describes the rapid expansion of the universe just after the Big Bang, which helps to explain the large-scale structure of the cosmos as well as the uniformity of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
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