2007/03/31 by Julien Lesgourgues, J. Lesgourgues, Wessel Valkenburg · 45 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Anisotropy #Astrophysics #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #CMB cold spot #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Geometry #Inflation (cosmology) #Inflaton #Mathematical physics #Observable #Observable universe #Particle physics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scalar (mathematics) #Theoretical physics #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.75.123519
published in Physical review. D. Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology/Physical review. D. Particles and fields 75(12) (American Physical Society) · 10 pages, 6 figures, codes available at http://wwwlapp.in2p3.fr/~lesgourgues/inflation/. Version to be published in Phys.Rev. D
openalex publication_date 2007/06/26 · arxiv created 2007/06/29 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We derive some new constraints on single-field inflation from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe 3-year data combined with the Sloan Luminous Red Galaxy survey. Our work differs from previous analyses by focusing only on the observable part of the inflaton potential, or in other words, by making absolutely no assumption about extrapolation of the potential from its observable region to its minimum (i.e., about the branch of the potential responsible for the last \ensuremath∼50 inflationary e-folds). We only assume that inflation starts at least a few e-folds before the observable Universe leaves the Hubble radius, and that the inflaton rolls down a monotonic and regular potential, with no sharp features or phase transitions. We Taylor-expand the inflaton potential at order v=2, 3 or 4 in the vicinity of the pivot scale, compute the primordial spectra of scalar and tensor perturbations numerically and fit the data. For v>2, a large fraction of the allowed models is found to produce a large negative running of the scalar tilt, and to fall in a region of parameter space where the second-order slow-roll formalism is strongly inaccurate. We release a code for the computation of inflationary perturbations which is compatible with cosmomc.