Inflation Model Selection meets Dark Radiation

Understand

We investigate how inflation model selection is affected by the presence of additional free-streaming relativistic degrees of freedom, i.e.

• dark radiation.
• We perform a full Bayesian analysis of both inflation parameters and cosmological parameters taking reheating into account self-consistently.
• We compute the Bayesian evidence for a few representative inflation scenarios in both the standard $\Lambda$CDM model and an extension including dark radiation parametrised by its effective number of relativistic species $N_\mathrm{eff}$.