2024/07/01 by Nandi, Debottam, Yadav, Simran, Kaur, Manjeet · 1 citation
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.01713
The inflationary paradigm not only addresses early universe puzzles but also aligns well with the observational constraints, with slow-roll inflationary models fitting the best. Evaluating these model predictions requires considering both slow-roll inflationary dynamics and the subsequent reheating epoch. This involves the quantitative analysis that takes into account the effective equation of state (EoS) and duration of reheating, connecting these with the perturbations generated deep during the inflationary era. Given the complexities involved, many approximations are often used for simplification. However, as future observations are expected to improve the accuracy of these observables significantly, this work takes a different approach. Instead of relying on approximations, and instead of looking into the complex effects of (pre-)reheating, we focus on the corrections arising purely from more accurate analytical evaluations of the perturbations generated during the inflationary era itself. This is because the reheating dynamics is model-dependent and lack a single concrete analytical description, and thus introduce large uncertainties, making robust predictions difficult. In this article, we mainly incorporate two improvements: the first is the accurate dynamics of the slow-roll evolution and, thus, the end of inflation, and the second is the higher-order slow-roll corrections to the perturbed observables. Our findings indicate that, by implementing these corrections, the theoretical predictions improve significantly. It also indicates that seemingly minor corrections can have significant effects on the perturbed observables, and these refined predictions can be compared with future observations to potentially rule out models and help resolve the degeneracy problem of the inflationary paradigm.