Initial conditions for simulated ‘tachyonic preheating’ and the Hartree ensemble approximation

In numerical simulations studying preheating in the classical approximation there is the problem how to derive the classical initial conditions from the quantum vacuum fluctuations. In past treatments, the initial conditions often put an energy density into the classical field of order of the cutoff, leading to a divergent temperature after thermalization. We suggest a solution to the problem which follows naturally from a Hartree ensemble approximation, introduced recently as an improvement over the standard Hartree approximation. We study the effects on particle numbers of the various treatments, within the context of ‘tachyonic preheating’ in 1+1 dimensional φ theory.