The Cosmic Microwave Background and Inflation Parameters

Abstract

We review the currrent cosmic parameter determinations of relevance to inflation using the WMAP-1year, Boomerang, CBI, Acbar and other CMB data. The basic steps in the pipelines which determine the bandpowers from the raw data from which these estimations are made are summarized. We forecast how the precision is likely to improve with more years of WMAP in combination with future ground-based experiments and with Planck. We address whether the current data indicates strong breaking from uniform acceleration through the relatively small region of the inflaton potential that the CMB probes, manifest in the much-discussed running spectral index or in even more radical braking/breaking scenarios. Although some weak ``anomalies'' appear in the current data, the statistical case is not there. However increased precision, at the high multipole end and with polarization measurements, will significantly curtail current freedom.

24 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables, Int. J. Theor. Phys. 2004, ed. E. Verdaguer, "Peyresq Physics 8", "The Early Universe: Confronting theory with observations" (June 21-27, 2003)

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• Dark energy and curvature from a future baryonic acoustic oscillation survey using the Lyman-alpha forest
• Estimating the impact of recombination uncertainties on the cosmological parameter constraints from cosmic microwave background experiments
• Measuring the primordial power spectrum: Principal component analysis of the cosmic microwave background
• Light Element Signatures of Sterile Neutrinos and Cosmological Lepton Numbers
• Cosmological parameters after WMAP5: forecasts for Planck and future galaxy surveys
• Do We Have Evidence for New Physics in the Sky?
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• Optimizing future experimental probes of inflation
• Big Bang Nucleosynthesis with Independent Neutrino Distribution Functions
• The Degeneracy Problem in Non-Canonical Inflation
• Nuclear weak interaction rates in primordial nucleosynthesis
• Identifying the inflaton with primordial gravitational waves
• Weak Interaction Rate Coulomb Corrections in Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
• Measuring the cosmological density perturbation