Constraints on the reheating temperature from sizable tensor modes

Domcke, Valerie;Heisig, Jan
(2015) Physical Review D — Vol. 92, n° 10, p. 103515 (2015)

Files

No attached file found for this publication.

Details

Authors
  • Domcke, Valerie
    Author
  • Heisig, Janorcid-logoUCLouvain
    Author
Abstract
Despite its importance for modeling the homogeneous hot early Universe very little is experimentally known about the magnitude of the reheating temperature, leaving an uncertainty of remarkable 18 orders of magnitude. In this paper we consider a general class of polynomial inflaton potentials up to fourth order. Employing a Monte Carlo scan and imposing theoretical and experimental constraints we derive a robust lower limit on the energy scale at the end of inflation, V_{end}^{1/4} > 3×10^{15} GeV for sizable tensor modes, r ≥ 10^{-3}. If the reheating phase is perturbative and matter dominated, this translates into a lower bound on the reheating temperature, yielding T_{rh} > 3×10^8 (7×10^2) GeV for gravitational inflaton decay through a generic dimension five (six) operator.
Affiliations

Citations

Domcke, V., & Heisig, J. (2015). Constraints on the reheating temperature from sizable tensor modes. Physical Review D, 92(10), 103515. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.92.103515 (Original work published 2015)