Reheating constraints on mutated hilltop inflation

Future research studies of cosmic microwave background polarization seems likely to provide a more improved upper bound of $r \le 0.03$ on the tensor-to-scalar ratio(r). In our work, we have done the reheating study of mutated hilltop inflation(MHI), a model falling in the broad category of small field inflation. We have parameterized reheating in terms of various parameters like reheating duration $N_{\text{rh}}$, reheating temperature $T_{\text{rh}}$ and effective equation of state $\overline{\omega }_{\text{rh}}$ using observationally viable values of scalar power spectrum amplitude $A_{\text{s}}$ and scalar spectral index $n_{\text{s}}$. In our study, working over a range of $\overline{\omega }_{\text{rh}}$, we found that the MHI potential is well consistent with combined Planck and BK18 observations for $\overline{\omega }_{\text{rh}} > 0$ within a particular range of model's parameter space and the lower values of the model parameter in MHI generate considerably smaller r compared to normal hilltop potential without any incompatibility of $n_s$ with observational data, making MHI a better choice in accordance to recent and future studies.

Sudhava Yadav, Dhwani Gangal, K.K. Venkataratnam · 2024