We use numerical relativity to study the violent preheating era at the end of inflation. This epoch can result in highly nonlinear fluctuations in density and gravitational potential which feed back onto the averaged expansion rate—an effect known as backreaction. Usually, simulations of preheating use the Friedmann constraint to enforce the Hubble expansion of spacetime during the evolution. In numerical relativity, this is not required and the inhomogeneous spacetime is evolved self-consistently. For a vanilla preheating model, we find a violation of the Friedmann constraint at the level of 0.005% over the entire simulation. This violation increases to $\sim 10\%$ as we sample smaller scales in the simulation domain.

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• Inflation
• Astrophysical & cosmological simulations
• Numerical relativity