Warm Affine Inflation

Abstract: The warm inflationary scenario is investigated in the context of affine gravity formalism. A general framework is provided for studying different single-field potentials. Using the sphaleron mechanism we explain the continuous dissipation of the inflaton field into radiation, leading to the $\Gamma=\Gamma_0 T^3$ dissipation coefficient. The treatment is performed in the weak and strong dissipation limits. We consider the quartic potential as a case study to provide a detailed study. Moreover, in this study, we discuss various constraints on inflationary models in general. We compare the theoretical results of the quartic potential model within warm inflation with the observational constraints from Planck $2018$ and BICEP/Keck 2018, as presented by the tensor-to-scalar ratio, spectral index and the perturbation spectrum.