We present the first assessment of the Ali Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization Telescope’s (AliCPT) sensitivity to the reheating epoch after cosmic inflation, based on its ability to detect primordial gravitational waves. We consider three models of inflation, an $\alpha$-attractor T-model, radion gauge inflation and quantum chromodynamics (QCD)-driven warm inflation. Assuming a fiducial value of $r=0.01$, we find that AliCPT-1, in its fully loaded focal plane detector configuration and combined with Planck, can provide measurements of the order of magnitude of the reheating temperature with an accuracy around 10%. For QCD-driven warm inflation this can be translated into a constraint on the inflaton coupling to gluons, which can be probed independently in axion search experiments. Our results constitute the first demonstration of AliCPT’s ability to probe the initial temperature of the hot big bang and the microphysical parameter connecting cosmic inflation and particle physics.

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• Cosmic microwave background
• Cosmology
• Hypothetical particle physics models
• Inflation
• Hypothetical particles
• Hypothetical scalars