2000/06/30 by Jerome Martin, Jérôme Martin, Alain Riazuelo +1 · 2 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Anisotropy #Astrophysics #COSMIC cancer database #Cosmic background radiation #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #Gravitational wave #Inflation (cosmology) #Multipole expansion #Observational cosmology #Physics #Planck #Quantum mechanics #Spectral density #Statistics #Theoretical physics #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/317275
published as Astrophys.J. 543 (2000) L99-L102 · 6 pages, 4 figures, minor changes to match the published version
openalex publication_date 2000/11/10 · arxiv created 2000/12/07 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We emphasize that the estimation of cosmological parameters from cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data, such as the recent high-resolution maps from BOOMERanG and MAXIMA-1, requires assumptions about the primordial spectra. The latter are predicted from inflation. The physically best-motivated scenario is that of slow-roll inflation. However, very often, the unphysical power-law inflation scenario is (implicitly) assumed in the CMB data analysis. We show that the predicted multipole moments differ significantly in both cases. We identify several misconceptions that are present in the literature (and in the way inflationary relations are often combined in popular numerical codes). For example, we do not believe that, generically, inflation predicts the relation n S - 1 = n T for the spectral indices of scalar and tensor perturbations or that gravitational waves are negligible. We calculate the CMB multipole moments for various values of the slow-roll parameters and demonstrate that an important part of the space of parameters ( n S , n T ) has been overlooked in the CMB data analysis so far.