First CMB Constraints on the Inflationary Reheating Temperature

Understand

We present the first Bayesian constraints on the single field inflationary reheating era obtained from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data.

• After demonstrating that this epoch can be fully characterized by the so-called reheating parameter, we show that it is constrained by the seven years Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropies Probe (WMAP7) data for all large and small field models.
• An interesting feature of our approach is that it yields lower bounds on the reheating temperature which can be combined with the upper bounds associated with gravitinos production.
• For large field models, we find the energy scale of reheating to be higher than those probed at the Large Hadron Collider, Ereh > 17.3 TeV at 95% of confidence.