Speaker
Jessica Cook
(Arizona State)
Description
One possibility for studying reheating is to link the duration and final temperature after reheating, as well as its equation of state, to inflationary observables. For single-field inflationary models, if we approximate reheating by a constant equation of state, one can derive relations between reheating parameters and the scalar power spectrum amplitude and spectral index. While this is a simple approximation, by restricting the equation of state to lie within a broad physically allowed range, one can in turn bracket an allowed range of $n_s$ and $r$ for these models. The added constraints can help break degeneracies between inflation models that otherwise overlap in their predictions.
Author
Jessica Cook
(Arizona State)
