Cosmological parameter estimation and the inflationary cosmology

By Samuel Leach, Andrew R. Liddle, Jérôme Martin, D. Schwarz. 2002

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We consider approaches to cosmological parameter estimation in the inflationary cosmology, focusing on the required accuracy of the initial power spectra. Parametrizing the spectra, for example by power laws, is well suited to testing the inflationary paradigm but will only correctly estimate cosmological parameters if the parametrization is sufficiently accurate, and we investigate conditions under which this is achieved both for present data and for upcoming satellite data. If inflation is favored, reliable estimation of its physical parameters requires an alternative approach adopting its detailed predictions. For slow-roll inflation, we investigate the accuracy of the predicted spectra at first and second order in the slow-roll expansion (presenting the complete second-order corrections for the tensors for the first time). We find that, within the presently allowed parameter space, there are regions where it will be necessary to include second-order corrections to reach the accuracy requirements of MAP and Planck satellite data. We end by proposing a data analysis pipeline appropriate for testing inflation and for a cosmological parameter estimation from high-precision data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1ca32c6b28d1cfc465e2391bff70bf2e04ded358

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Citations in the corpus

The emergent universe: an explicit construction (2003, background): “As a preliminary check, we note that the spectral index of scalar perturbations may quite easily be estimated by following the prescription of [20].”
First-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Implications For Inflation (2003, methodology): “…for the maximum likelihood single field inflation model for theWMAPext+2dFGRS data sets presented in the table notes of Table 1 in §3.3, this relation is r2 = 0.6332 r. 12This definition of r agrees with the definition of T/S in the CAMB code (Lewis et al. 2000) and r in Leach et al. (2002).”
Probing a QCD string axion with precision cosmological measurements (2004, methodology): “Here we adopt the normalization used by the WMAP collaboration [15, 31] in which the tensor to scalar ratio is defined by the ratio of spectral power densities at some reference scale k0,”
Planck2018 results (2018, methodology): “…constraints on the slow-roll potential parameters V and ηV can be obtained by an exact remapping of the constraints on the HFF parameters (Leach et al. 2002; Finelli et al. 2010) given above: V < 0.0063 (0.0045) (95 % CL) , (39) ηV = −0.010+0.004−0.008 ( −0.011+0.004−0.006 ) (68 % CL) .”
The first WIMPy halos (2005, background): “a0, a1 and a2 are given by equations (26)–(28) of [42].”