Generic inference of inflation models by non-Gaussianity and primordial power spectrum reconstruction

Understand

We present a generic inference method for inflation models from observational data by the usage of higher-order statistics of the curvature perturbation on uniform density hypersurfaces.

• This method is based on the calculation of the posterior for the primordial non-Gaussianity parameters $f_\text{NL}$ and $g_\text{NL}$, which in general depend on specific parameters of inflation and reheating models, and enables to discriminate among the still viable inflation models.
• To keep analyticity as far as possible to dispense with numerically expensive sampling techniques a saddle-point approximation is introduced, whose precision is validated for a numerical toy example.
• The mathematical formulation is done in a generic way so that the approach remains applicable to cosmic microwave background data as well as to large scale structure data.