2003/01/01 by Scott Dodelson · 1 voice · 4 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #astro-ph #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/1.1627736
published as AIP Conf.Proc.689:184-196,2003 · 16 pages, 13 figures, Invited Talk at Fourth Tropical Workshop, Cairns, Australia, June 2003
arxiv created 2003/09/05 · arxiv updated 2014/11/17
Cosmologists have developed a phenomenally successful picture of structure in the universe based on the idea that the universe expanded exponentially in its earliest moments. There are three pieces of evidence for this exponential expansion -- \it inflation -- from observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. First, the shape of the primordial spectrum is very similar to that predicted by generic inflation models. Second, the angular scale at which the first acoustic peak appears is consistent with the flat universe predicted by inflation. Here I describe the third piece of evidence, perhaps the most convincing of all: the phase coherence needed to account for the clear peak/trough structure observed by the WMAP satellite and its predecessors. I also discuss alternatives to inflation that have been proposed recently and explain how they produce coherent phases.