Observational constraints on warm inflation in loop quantum cosmology
By incorporating quantum aspects of gravity, Loop Quantum Cosmology (LQC) provides a self-consistent extension of the inflationary scenario, allowing for modifications in the primordial inflationary power spectrum with respect to the standard General Relativity one. We investigate such modifications and explore the constraints imposed by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Planck Collaboration data on the Warm Inflation (WI) scenario in the LQC context. We obtain useful relations between the dissipative parameter of WI and the bounce scale parameter of LQC. We also find that the number of required e-folds of expansion from the bounce instant till the moment the observable scales crossed the Hubble radius during inflation can be smaller in WI than in CI. In particular, we find that this depends on how large is the dissipation in WI, with the amount of required e-folds decreasing with the increasing of the dissipation value. {}Furthermore, by performing a Monte Carlo Markov Chain analysis for the considered WI models, we find good agreement of the model with the data. This shows that the WI models studied here can explain the current observations also in the context of LQC.