LiteBIRD and CMB-S4 sensitivities to reheating in plateau models of inflation

We study the sensitivity of LiteBIRD and CMB-S4 to the reheating temperature and the inflaton coupling in three types of plateau-potential models of inflation, namely mutated hilltop inflation, radion gauge inflation, and α-attractor T models. We first find relations between model parameters and CMB observables in all models. We then perform Monte Carlo Markov Chain based forecasts to quantify the information gain on the reheating temperature, the inflaton coupling, and the scale of inflation that can be achieved with LiteBIRD and CMB-S4, assuming a fiducial tensor-to-scalar ratio r̅ ∼ 0.02 and neglecting foreground contamination of the B-mode polarization spectrum. We compare the results of the forecasts to those obtained from a recently proposed simple analytic method. We find that both LiteBIRD and CMB-S4 can simultaneously constrain the scale of inflation and the reheating temperature in all three types of models. They can for the first time obtain both an upper and lower bound on the latter, comprising the first ever measurement of the big bang temperature. In the mutated hilltop inflation and radion gauge inflation models this can be translated into a measurement of the inflaton coupling in parts of the parameter space. Constraining this microphysical parameter will help to understand how these models of inflation may be embedded into a more fundamental theory of particle physics.