Warm inflation dynamics in the low temperature regime

Abstract

Warm inflation scenarios are studied with the dissipative coefficient computed in the equilibrium approximation. Use is made of the analytical expressions available in the low temperature regime with focus on the possibility of achieving strong dissipation within this approximation. Two different types of models are examined: monomial or equivalently chaotic type potentials, and hybrid like models where the energy density during inflation is dominated by the false vacuum. In both cases dissipation is shown to typically increase during inflation and bring the system into the strong dissipative regime. Observational consequences are explored for the amplitude of the primordial spectrum and the spectral index, which translate into constraints on the number of fields mediating the dissipative mechanism, and the number of light degrees of freedom produced during inflation. This paper furthers the foundational development of warm inflation dynamics from first principles quantum field theory by calculating conservative lower bound estimates on dissipative effects during inflation using the well established thermal equilibrium approximation. This approximation does not completely represent the actual physical system and earlier work has shown relaxing both the equilibrium and low temperature constraints can substantially enlarge the warm inflation regime, but these improvements still need further theoretical development.