2004/06/29 by William H. Kinney, Kinney, William H.
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0406670
8 pages, 4 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the XXXIXth Rencontres de Moriond "Exploring the Universe"
arxiv created 2004/06/29 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
I examine the status of inflationary cosmology in light of the first-year data from the WMAP satellite, focusing on the simplest models of inflation: those driven by a single scalar field. The WMAP observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background is the first unified, self-consistent data set capable of putting meaningful constraints on the inflationary parameter space. WMAP provides significant support for the inflationary paradigm in general, and single-field slow-roll inflation models provide a good fit to existing observational constraints.