Constraints on α-attractor inflation and reheating

Yoshiki Ueno, Kazuhiro Yamamoto

Published 2016-02-24Version 1

We investigate a constraint on reheating followed by alpha-attractor-type inflation (the E-model and T-model) from an observation of the spectral index n_s. When the energy density of the universe is dominated by an energy component with the cosmic equation-of-state parameter w_{re} during reheating, its e-folding number N_{re} and the reheating temperature T_{re} are bounded depending on w_{re}. When the reheating epoch consists of two phases, where the energy density of the universe is dominated by uniform inflaton field oscillations in the first phase and by relativistic non-thermalised particles in the second phase, we find a constraint on the e-folding number of the first oscillation phase, N_{sc}, depending the parameters of the inflaton potential. For the simplest perturbative reheating scenario, we find the lower bound for a coupling constant of inflaton decay in the E-model and T-model depending on the model parameters. We also find a constraint on the $\alpha$ parameter, \alpha\simgt 0.01, for the T-model and E-model when we assume a broad resonance reheating scenario.