Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW D
Volume 83, Issue 4, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.83.043505
Keywords
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Funding
- CCAPP at Ohio State
- European Commission [MIRG-CT-2007-203314]
- STFC
- Leverhulme Trust
- United States Department of Energy [DE-FG02-92ER-40704]
- National Science Foundation [CAREER-PHY-0747868]
- Higher Education Funding Council for England
- NASA Office of Space Science
- STFC [PP/E004121/2, PP/E004121/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Science and Technology Facilities Council [PP/E004121/2, PP/E004121/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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Future astrophysical data sets promise to strengthen constraints on models of inflation, and extracting these constraints requires methods and tools commensurate with the quality of the data. In this paper we describe MODECODE, a new, publicly available code that computes the primordial scalar and tensor power spectra for single-field inflationary models. MODECODE solves the inflationary mode equations numerically, avoiding the slow roll approximation. It is interfaced with CAMB and COSMOMC to compute cosmic microwave background angular power spectra and perform likelihood analysis and parameter estimation. MODECODE is easily extendable to additional models of inflation, and future updates will include Bayesian model comparison. Errors from MODECODE contribute negligibly to the error budget for analyses of data from Planck or other next generation experiments. We constrain representative single-field models (phi(n) with n = 2/3, 1, 2, and 4, natural inflation, and hilltop inflation) using current data, and provide forecasts for Planck. From current data, we obtain weak but nontrivial limits on the post-inflationary physics, which is a significant source of uncertainty in the predictions of inflationary models, while we find that Planck will dramatically improve these constraints. In particular, Planck will link the inflationary dynamics with the post-inflationary growth of the horizon, and thus begin to probe the primordial dark ages between TeV and grand unified theory scale energies.
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