English

Information Gain on Reheating: the One Bit Milestone

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2016-09-16 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We show that the Planck 2015 and BICEP2/KECK measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies provide together an information gain of 0.82 +- 0.13 bits on the reheating history over all slow-roll single-field models of inflation. This corresponds to a 40% improvement compared to the Planck 2013 constraints on the reheating. Our method relies on an exhaustive CMB data analysis performed over nearly 200 models of inflation to derive the Kullback-Leibler entropy between the prior and the fully marginalized posterior of the reheating parameter. This number is a weighted average by the Bayesian evidence of each model to explain the data thereby ensuring its fairness and robustness.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1603.02606,
  title  = {Information Gain on Reheating: the One Bit Milestone},
  author = {Jerome Martin and Christophe Ringeval and Vincent Vennin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.02606},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

6 pages, 3 figures, uses RevTeX. References added, matches published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T13:06:37.740Z