Constraining Warm Inflation With CMB Data

Warm inflation is an exciting alternative to the standard cold inflation scenario where the inflating universe had a warm exit to the radiation dominated era rather than a super-cold exit to a reheating phase (in the standard cold inflation). The constraints from Planck satellite has ruled out most of the text book potentials such as quartic potential in the standard scenario. In this work, we constrain the model parameters for warm inflation from Planck 2015 data. We have worked with the quartic potential in the warm inflation scenario and have shown this potential is well alive (w.r.t the Planck constraints) in the warm scenario. In addition, the reheating era can be optimized by varying the number of e-folds of inflation. Best fit values for the model parameters are estimated with and without the contribution to fluctuation from thermal excitation.