Accurate Slow-roll Predictions for Inflationary Cosmology

Reheating consistent slow-roll predictions for a subset of inflationary models supported by aspic, plotted over the one- and two-sigma confidence intervals of Planck 2013 (grey), Planck 2015 + BICEP2 (cyan) and Planck Legacy Data (Polarization, Lensing and BK15 included). Jeffreys' prior on the first Hubble flow function on the left, flat prior on the right. The annotated values show the logarithmic energy scale, log(Ereh/GeV), at which a matter dominated reheating ends (arXiv:1303.3787).

Aspic is a collection of fast modern fortran routines for computing various observable quantities used in Cosmology from definite single field inflationary models. It is distributed as a scientific library and aims at providing an efficient, extendable and accurate way of comparing theoretical inflationary predictions with cosmological data. Aspic currently supports more than an hundred models of inflation, and more to come!

By observable quantities, we currently refer to as the Hubble flow functions, up to second order in the slow-roll approximation, which are in direct correspondence with the spectral index, the tensor-to-scalar ratio and the running of the primordial power spectrum. The aspic library also provides the field potential, its first and second derivatives, the energy density at the end of inflation, the energy density at the end of reheating, and the field value (or e-fold value) at which the pivot scale crossed the Hubble radius during inflation. All these quantities are computed in a way which is consistent with the existence of a reheating phase.

The code is released as a GNU software which compiles itself into both a static and shared library. As the list of inflationary models is always increasing, you are encouraged to add support for any model that would not yet be implemented.

Please, check the MAN file for a complete documentation and download the source file or checkout the development repository.

For details, please read the original paper arXiv:1303.3787


For an exact integration of any inflationary models, without assuming slow-roll, checkout the FieldInf code and library. For the curvaton scenario, checkout the extension aspic-curvaton.


Last modif 04/2023