Bayesian Analysis of Inflation II: Model Selection and Constraints on Reheating
By R. Easther, Hiranya V. Peiris. 2011
132 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We discuss the model selection problem for inflationary cosmology. We couple ModeCode, a publicly-available numerical solver for the primordial perturbation spectra, to the nested sampler MultiNest, in order to efficiently compute Bayesian evidence. Particular attention is paid to the specification of physically realistic priors, including the parametrization of the post-inflationary expansion and associated thermalization scale. It is confirmed that while present-day data tightly constrains the properties of the power spectrum, it cannot usefully distinguish between the members of a large class of simple inflationary models. We also compute evidence using a simulated Planck likelihood, showing that while Planck will have more power than WMAP to discriminate between inflationary models, it will not definitively address the inflationary model selection problem on its own. However, Planck will place very tight constraints on any model with more than one observationally-distinct inflationary regime -- e.g. the large- and small-field limits of the hilltop inflation model -- and put useful limits on different reheating scenarios for a given model.
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Citations in the corpus
- polychord: next-generation nested sampling (2015, methodology): “In addition, PolyChord is an integral component of the ModeChord code, a combination of CosmoChord and ModeCode (Mortonson et al. 2011; Easther & Peiris 2012; Norena et al. 2012), which is available at http://modecode.org/.”
- Mechanisms for primordial black hole production in string theory (2018, methodology): “Parametrizing our ignorance about the postinflationary Universe by an average equation of state wp and the energy density at the time of reheating ρrh, we can quantify this uncertainty by using the matching equation [49, 77, 78],”
- The best inflationary models after Planck (2013, unknown): “[31, 32].”