Friday, March 15, 2013

1303.3508 (Sam Bartrum et al.)

Warming up for Planck    [PDF]

Sam Bartrum, Arjun Berera, Joao G. Rosa
A basic question of inflationary cosmology is whether the seeds of primordial density perturbations are of quantum or thermal origin. The release of the Planck results on the horizon presents a key opportunity to address this question in the context of warm inflation. While cold inflation with a single slowly rolling scalar field is characterized by a unique consistency relation between the tensor-to-scalar ratio and the tensor spectral index, $r=8|n_t|$, in warm inflation this relation depends on the temperature of the thermal bath. It can nevertheless be shown that $r< 8|n_t|$ and so observing any such deviation from the cold inflation relation could hint at a thermal origin for the adiabatic fluctuations. Furthermore, the observed baryon asymmetry may be produced through dissipative effects during warm inflation, leading to observable baryon isocurvature perturbations that can be used to further test warm inflation models. In this work we derive generic consistency relations between observables in the strong and weak dissipative regimes for a supersymmetric model of warm inflation in the low-temperature regime. In particular, we derive relations that are independent of the form of the inflationary potential and then apply them to a few canonical potentials.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.3508

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