  It may prove useful in cosmology to understand the behavior of the energy
distribution in a scalar field that interacts only with gravity and with itself
by a pure quartic potential, because if such a field existed it would be
gravitationally produced, as a squeezed state, during inflation. It is known
that the mean energy density in such a field after inflation varies with the
expansion of the universe in the same way as radiation. I show that if the
field initially is close to homogeneous, with small energy density contrast
delta rho /rho and coherence length L, the energy density fluctuations behave
like acoustic oscillations in an ideal relativistic fluid for a time on the
order of L/|delta rho /rho|. This ends with the appearance of features that
resemble shock waves, but interact in a close to elastic way that reversibly
disturbs the energy distribution.
