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How well can future CMB missions constrain cosmic inflation?

  • Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris
  • University of Louvain

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

67 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We study how the next generation of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) measurement missions (such as EPIC, LiteBIRD, PRISM and COrE) will be able to constrain the inflationary landscape in the hardest to disambiguate situation in which inflation is simply described by single-field slow-roll scenarios. Considering the proposed PRISM and LiteBIRD satellite designs, we simulate mock data corresponding to five different fiducial models having values of the tensor-to-scalar ratio ranging from 10-1 down to 10-7. We then compute the Bayesian evidences and complexities of all Encyclopædia Inflationaris models in order to assess the constraining power of PRISM alone and LiteBIRD complemented with the Planck 2013 data. Within slow-roll inflation, both designs have comparable constraining power and can rule out about three quarters of the inflationary scenarios, compared to one third for Planck 2013 data alone. However, we also show that PRISM can constrain the scalar running and has the capability to detect a violation of slow roll at second order. Finally, our results suggest that describing an inflationary model by its potential shape only, without specifying a reheating temperature, will no longer be possible given the accuracy level reached by the future CMB missions.

Original languageEnglish
Article number038
JournalJournal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Volume2014
Issue number10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Oct 2014
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • cosmo-logical perturbation theory
  • ination, CMBR experiments
  • primordial gravitational waves (theory)

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