  We present a fully nonlinear study of the development of equilibrium after
preheating. Preheating is the exponentially rapid transfer of energy from the
nearly homogeneous inflaton field to fluctuations of other fields and/or the
inflaton itself. This rapid transfer leaves these fields in a highly nonthermal
state with energy concentrated in infrared modes. We have performed lattice
simulations of the evolution of interacting scalar fields during and after
preheating for a variety of inflationary models. We have formulated a set of
generic rules that govern the thermalization process in all of these models.
Notably, we see that once one of the fields is amplified through parametric
resonance or other mechanisms it rapidly excites other coupled fields to
exponentially large occupation numbers. These fields quickly acquire nearly
thermal spectra in the infrared, which gradually propagates into higher
momenta. Prior to the formation of total equilibrium, the excited fields group
into subsets with almost identical characteristics (e.g. group effective
temperature). The way fields form into these groups and the properties of the
groups depend on the couplings between them. We also studied the onset of chaos
after preheating by calculating the Lyapunov exponent of the scalar fields.
