http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.03280
In inflationary cosmology, cosmic reheating after inflation sets the initial conditions for the hot big bang. It has recently been proposed to use the imprint of reheating in the CMB to constrain models of inflation or the reheating phase itself. We critically assess this proposal in view of the complexity of the reheating process in realistic models. We illustrate in simple examples that the effect of reheating on the CMB in general cannot be quantified by fixing the inflaton’s effective potential and its couplings to matter and radiation, but depends on the details of the particle physics model it is embedded into. However, in models without parametric resonance, this dependency is rather weak, and one can in principle obtain constraints on the inflaton couplings from the CMB.
M. Drewes
Thu, 12 Nov 15
33/61
Comments: 23 pages
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