Encyclopaedia Inflationaris

TL;DR

The paper introduces ASPIC, a comprehensive library for analyzing 118 inflationary models, systematically presenting their predictions to aid in constraining inflation theories with current astrophysical data.

Contribution

It provides the first systematic compilation and analysis of predictions for 118 inflationary models, facilitating comparison with observational data.

Findings

Systematic predictions for 118 inflation models

Facilitates comparison with CMB data

Supports reheating-consistent observable calculations

Abstract

The current flow of high accuracy astrophysical data, among which are the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) measurements by the Planck satellite, offers an unprecedented opportunity to constrain the inflationary theory. This is however a challenging project given the size of the inflationary landscape which contains hundreds of different scenarios. Given that there is currently no observational evidence for primordial non-Gaussianities, isocurvature perturbations or any other non-minimal extension of the inflationary paradigm, a reasonable approach is to consider the simplest models first, namely the slow-roll single field models with minimal kinetic terms. This still leaves us with a very populated landscape, the exploration of which requires new and efficient strategies. It has been customary to tackle this problem by means of approximate model independent methods while a more ambitious alternative is to study the inflationary scenarios one by one. We have developed the publicly available runtime library ASPIC to implement this last approach. The ASPIC code provides all routines needed to quickly derive reheating-consistent observable predictions within this class of scenarios. ASPIC has been designed as an evolutive code which presently supports 118 different models. In this paper, for each of the ASPIC models, we present and collect new results in a systematic manner, thereby constituting the first Encyclopaedia Inflationaris.