The energy scale of inflation: is the hunt for the primordial B-mode a waste of time?

Abstract

Recent theoretical results indicate that the detection of primordial gravity waves from inflation may be a hopeless task. First, foregrounds from lensing put a strict lower limit on the detectability of the B-mode polarization signal in the Cosmic Microwave Background, the ``smoking gun'' for tensor (gravity wave) fluctuations. Meanwhile, widely accepted theoretical arguments indicate that the amplitude of gravity waves produced in inflation will be below this limit. I argue that failure is not inevitable, and that the effort to detect the primordial signal in the B-mode, whether it succeeds or fails, will yield crucial information about the nature of inflation.

To be published in the proceedings of "The Cosmic Microwave Background and its Polarization", New Astronomy Reviews, (eds. S. Hanany and K.A. Olive). 10 pp., 7 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Reconstruction of lensing from the cosmic microwave background polarization
• WMAP and Inflation

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