The importance of being warm (during inflation)
  The amplitude of primordial curvature perturbations is enhanced when a
radiation bath at a temperature T>H is sustained during inflation by
dissipative particle production, which is particularly significant when a
non-trivial statistical ensemble of inflaton fluctuations is also maintained.
Since gravitational modes are oblivious to dissipative dynamics, this
generically lowers the tensor-to-scalar ratio and yields a modified consistency
relation for warm inflation, as well as changing the tilt of the scalar
spectrum. We show that this alters the landscape of observationally allowed
inflationary models, with for example the quartic chaotic potential being in
very good agreement with the Planck results for nearly-thermal inflaton
fluctuations, whilst essentially ruled out for an underlying vacuum state. We
also discuss other simple models that are in agreement with the Planck data
within a renormalizable model of warm inflation.
