Fermion production from preheating-amplified metric perturbations Original Research Article

We study gravitational creation of light fermions in the presence of classical scalar metric perturbations about a flat Friedmann–Lemaitre–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) background. These perturbations can be large during preheating, breaking the conformal flatness of the background spacetime. We compute numerically the total number of particles generated by the modes of the metric perturbations which have grown sufficiently to become classical. In the absence of inhomogeneities massless fermions are not gravitationally produced, and then this effect may be relevant for abundance estimates of light gravitational relics.