Primordial Gravitational Waves and Reheating in a New Class of Plateau-like Inflationary Potentials

Abstract

We study a new class of inflation model parametrized by the Hubble radius, such that $aH\propto \exp (-k{\varphi }^n)$. These potentials are plateau-like, and reduce to the power-law potentials in the simplest case $n=2$. We investigate the range of model parameters that is consistent with current observational constraints on the scalar spectral index and the tensor-to-scalar ratio. The amplitude of primordial gravitational waves in these models is shown to be accessible by future laser interferometers such as DECIGO. We also demonstrate how these observables are affected by the temperature and equation of state during reheating. We find that a large subset of this model can support instantaneous reheating, as well as very low reheating temperatures of order a few MeV, giving rise to interesting consequences for dark-matter production.

References in corpus (5)

• Reheating in Inflationary Cosmology: Theory and Applications
• Bouncing Cosmologies: Progress and Problems
• Prospects for direct detection of primordial gravitational waves
• Effect of transitions in the Planck mass during inflation on primordial power spectra
• Inflation model building with an accurate measure of e-folding

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Natural inflation with natural number of e-foldings