Constraining primordial oscillations and inflationary particle production with Planck, ACT DR6, and DESI DR2

Abstract

Non-standard inflationary models often predict oscillatory features in the primordial power spectrum. We present constraints on general oscillatory templates for primordial power spectra, including those that vary linearly and logarithmically with wavenumber, as well as oscillations induced by inflationary particle production. We utilize the Planck 2018 and Atacama Cosmology Telescope Data Release 6 cosmic microwave background data as well as large-scale structure data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Data Release 2. To efficiently explore the multimodal posteriors for these models as well as performing mode comparisons, we integrate the preconditioned sequential Monte Carlo sampler, pocoMC, into the widely used sampling code, Cobaya. We find that the combined dataset tightens the 95% CL upper bounds on the general oscillation amplitudes to $A_{\text{lin}} < 0.021$, $A_{\text{log}} < 0.022$, and $A_{\text{log rf}} < 0.023$, restricting the amplitude to $\sim 2\%\, A_s$. For the inflationary particle production model, our analysis places a maximum a posteriori constraint on the coupling constant of $g = 0.034$. While these models all provide an improved fit to the data compared to the concordance $Λ$CDM model, the Bayesian evidence still reveals a moderate preference for $Λ$CDM compared to models with general oscillations and is inconclusive regarding the particle production model, suggesting that the added complexity of these models beyond the standard model is not statistically justified by current data.