First CMB Constraints on the Inflationary Reheating Temperature

By Jérôme Martin, C. Ringeval. 2010

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We present the first Bayesian constraints on the single field inflationary reheating era obtained from cosmic microwave background (CMB) data. After demonstrating that this epoch can be fully characterized by the so-called reheating parameter, we show that it is constrained by the seven years Wilkinson microwave anisotropies probe (WMAP7) data for all large and small field models. An interesting feature of our approach is that it yields lower bounds on the reheating temperature which can be combined with the upper bounds associated with gravitinos production. For large field models, we find the energy scale of reheating to be higher than those probed at the Large Hadron Collider, rho(1/4)(reh) > 17.3 TeV at 95% of the confidence limit. For small field models, we obtain the two-sigma lower limits rho(1/4)(reh) > 890 TeV for a mean equation of state during reheating (w) over bar (reh) = -0.3 and rho(1/4)(reh) > 390 GeV for (w) over bar (reh) = -0.2. The physical origin of these constraints is pedagogically explained by means of the slow-roll approximation. Finally, when marginalizing over all possible reheating history, the WMAP7 data push massive inflation under pressure (p < 2.2 at 95% of the confidence limit where p is the power index of the large field potentials) while they slightly favor super-Planckian field expectation values in the small field models.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b60039a87dcb6522329ea579dec3b665ffab9864

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Citations in the corpus

Inflation and the scale dependent spectral index: prospects and strategies (2010, methodology): “16) to account for each possible phase in the postinflationary universe, we define an effective equation of state [31, 32]”
The best inflationary models after Planck (2013, background): “[29] is restricted to equations of state of the form wreh = (p− 2)/(p + 2), which emerges in the case of a potential with the shape ∝ φ.”
Planck2018 results (2018, background): “…can be expressed in terms of the parameters of the inflationary model and the number of e-folds to the end of inflation, N∗ (Liddle & Leach 2003; Martin & Ringeval 2010), given by (PCI13) N∗ ' 67 − ln ( k∗ a0H0 ) + 1 4 ln V2∗M4pl ρend + 1 − 3wint 12(1 + wint) ln ( ρth ρend ) − 1 12 ln(gth) ,…”
Reheating predictions in single field inflation (2015, background): “Notice that hilltop inflation was previously studied in the context of reheating in [11, 78, 83].”
Inflaton oscillations and post-inflationary reheating (2020, background): “More precisely, [80, 100], N∗ = ln  1 √ 3 ( π2 30 )1/4 (43 11 )1/3 T0 H0 − ln( k∗ a0H0 ) + (1)4 ln ( V 2 ∗ M4 Pρend )”