Inflação e reaquecimento: uma revisão compreensiva e análise de modelos de campo único à luz de observações

Abstract

The launch of projects such as Planck (ESA), BICEP/Keck (ESA) e SPT (NSF) has fostered, within the last decade, significant breakthroughs in observational cosmology. Given the crucial influence of the inflationary period over the development of the current spectrum of cosmic background radiation (CMB), a demand for an updated review of the existing literature on this subject is noticed. This work aims to extensively aggregate all previous results relevant to cosmic inflation and the ensuing reheating phase, acting as a pedagogical tool for students and professors. The analysis is restricted to single-field inflation. A general introduction to inflationary cosmology is initially provided, and perturbations of the inflaton 𝜑 and its metric 𝑔𝜇𝜈 are derived. Subsequently, the phases of pre-heating, inflaton disintegration and transition to thermal equilibrium are discussed. Lattice simulations are employed for numerical analysis. Finally, six inflationary models are studied, selected among the available in the ASPIC shared library, and their predictions are compared with the observed CMB anisotropy spectrum. The Starobinsky and Higgs models (SI-HI, RCHI) were favored, followed by hilltop inflation in its mutated and quartic versions (MHI, SFI4). The data is sourced from Planck-2018+BAO+BK18.