Monomial warm inflation revisited

Understand

We revisit the idea that the inflaton may have dissipated part of its energy into a thermal bath during inflation, considering monomial inflationary potentials and three different forms of dissipation rate.

• Using a numerical Fokker-Planck approach to describe the stochastic dynamics of inflationary fluctuations, we confront this scenario with current bounds on the spectrum of curvature fluctuations and primordial gravitational waves.
• We also obtain purely analytical approximations that improve over previously used ones in the small dissipation regime for the amplitude of the spectrum and its tilt.
• We show that only our numerical Fokker-Planck method is accurate, fast and precise enough to test these models against current data.