Particle Production during Inflation in Light of PLANCK

Understand

We consider trapped inflation in a higher dimensional field space: particle production at a dense distribution of extra species points leads to a terminal velocity at which inflation can be driven in steep potentials.

• We compute an additional, nearly scale invariant contribution to the power-spectrum, caused by back-scattering of the continuously produced particles.
• Since this contribution has a blue tilt, it has to be sub-dominant, leading to an upper bound on the coupling constant between the inflatons and the extra species particles.
• The remaining allowed parameter space is narrow.