Model-independent constraints on inflation and reheating

TL;DR

This paper develops a model-independent formalism to constrain inflation and reheating parameters using CMB data, providing bounds on the inflationary energy scale, reheating duration, and implications for gravitational wave detection.

Contribution

The work introduces a general formalism for analyzing reheating constraints in single-field slow-roll inflation without relying on specific models.

Findings

Upper bound on inflationary efolds: N_k ≤ 56.09.

Lower inflationary energy scale as N_k decreases.

Extended reheating can enhance gravitational wave detectability.

Abstract

Reheating connects the inflationary universe to the radiation-dominated evolution of standard Big Bang cosmology. Due to the lack of direct observations, we rely on indirect bounds on this phase from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data. Using reheating constraints to arrive at additional constraints on inflationary models is prevalent in the literature. In this work, we develop a formalism to analyze the reheating constraints for the general case of single field canonical slow-roll inflation without dealing with a specific inflationary model. We find that using the lower bound on reheating temperature and the upper bound on the tensor-to-scalar ratio: one can constrain the inflationary energy scale and the duration of the reheating epoch after slow-roll inflation. Following the standard practice, we described the reheating phase with an effective equation of state parameter~($w_{\rm re}$). However, with the present formalism, we can have quantitative information of the reheating phase even when the reheating equation of state behaves as radiation $w_{\rm re} = 1/3$. For the canonical reheating phase described by $w_{\rm re}<1/3$, we find that the inflationary efolding number must be bounded from above, i.e., $N_k\leq56.09$. Consequently, if inflationary efolds satisfy this upper bound---i.e., $N_k=56.09$---a finite period of reheating is only possible for exotic reheating phases described by $w_{\rm re}>1/3$. We also find that as we lower the value of $N_k$, the corresponding energy scale of inflation also decreases. Consequently, it will be more and more difficult to detect the corresponding inflationary gravitational wave signals with the Gravitational Waves mission. Finally, we show how an extended period of canonical reheating can improve the situation in those cases.