A novel way to determine the scale of inflation

We show that in the Feebly Interacting Massive Particle (FIMP) model of Dark Matter (DM), one may express the inflationary energy scale H_* as a function of three otherwise unrelated quantities, the DM isocurvature perturbation amplitude, its mass and its self-coupling constant, independently of the tensor-to-scalar ratio. The FIMP model assumes that there exists a real scalar particle that alone constitutes the DM content of the Universe and couples to the Standard Model via a Higgs portal. We consider carefully the various astrophysical, cosmological and model constraints, accounting also for variations in inflationary dynamics and the reheating history, to derive a robust estimate for H_* that is confined to a relatively narrow range. We point out that, within the context of the FIMP DM model, one may thus determine H_* reliably even in the absence of observable tensor perturbations.