Thermal blocking of preheating
  The parametric resonance responsible for preheating after inflation will end
when self-interactions of the resonating field and interactions of this field
with secondary degrees of freedom become important. In many cases, the effect
may be quantified in terms of an effective mass and the resulting shifting out
of the spectrum of the strongest resonance band. In certain curvaton models,
such thermal blocking can even occur before preheating has begun, delaying or
even preventing the decay of the curvaton. We investigate numerically to what
extent this thermal blocking is realised in a specific scenario, and whether
the effective mass is well approximated by the perturbative leading order
thermal mass. We find that the qualitative behaviour is well reproduced in this
approximation, and that the end of preheating can be confidently estimated.
