Constraints through decaying inflaton: maximum reheating temperature

Abstract

In this paper we study the reheating constraints on inflationary models considering perturbatively decaying inflaton. Important difference with the existing analysis is the inclusion of explicit decaying dynamics of inflaton during reheating. One of the important findings of our analysis is the possible existence of maximum reheating temperature $T_{re}^{max}$ considering perturbative reheating scenario. For all the models under consideration the value of this temperature turned out to be $T_{re}^{max} \sim 10^{15}$ GeV. Corresponding to this value of reheating temperature the duration of reheating period assumes naturally small value, $N_{re} \simeq 0.3$ which indicates instantaneous reheating. Most importantly, maximum reheating temperature $T^{max}_{re}$ also leads to a maximum values of scalar spectral index $n^{max}_s$ and inflationary e-folding number $N^{max}_{cmb}$ in association with the observed CMB scale. Based on our general analysis, we have studied four different inflationary models, and discuss their predictions and constraints.