Testing Inflation and Curvaton Scenarios with CMB Distortions

Understand

Prior to recombination, Silk damping causes the dissipation of energy from acoustic waves into the monopole of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), resulting in spectral distortions.

• These can be used to probe the primordial scalar power spectrum on smaller scales than it is possible with CMB anisotropies.
• An enhancement of power on these scales is nevertheless required for the resulting distortions to be detectable by future experiments like PIXIE.
• In this paper, we examine all 49 single-field inflation models listed by Martin et al.