Study of warm inflationary models and their parameter estimation from CMB

Abstract

Observations of the temperature anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation show that the models of inflation with the monomial potentials are inconsistent with the allowed $n_s-r$ bounds. However certain monomial potentials of inflation are allowed in the context of \textit{Warm Inflation}, where the inflaton's coupling with other fields are significant both \textit{during and after} the inflationary phase. In our study, we consider $\lambda\phi^4$ and $\lambda\phi^6$ models of warm inflation with different forms of the inflaton dissipation coefficient. We parameterize the primordial power spectrum in terms of the model parameters, namely, the inflaton self coupling, $\lambda$, and the dissipation parameter, $Q_P$, due to inflaton's interaction with the other fields. Then we obtain the joint and marginal distributions of these parameters by carrying out a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis using the {\tt CosmoMC} numerical code. An estimation of these physical parameters is essential for model building. We also obtain the $n_s$ and $r$ values for the mean values of the parameters and find them to be consistent with the observational bounds, confirming that these simple models are viable models for describing inflation.