Does the small CMB quadrupole moment suggest new physics

By J. Cline, P. Crotty, Julien Lesgourgues. 2003

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Motivated by WMAP's confirmation of an anomalously low value of the quadrupole moment of the CMB temperature fluctuations, we investigate the effects on the CMB of cutting off the primordial power spectrum P(k) at low wave numbers. This could arise, for example, from a break in the inflaton potential, a prior period of matter or radiation domination, or an oscillating scalar field which couples to the inflaton. We reanalyse the full WMAP parameter space supplemented by a low-k cutoff for P(k). The temperature correlations by themselves are better fit by a cutoff spectrum, but including the TE temperature-polarization spectrum reduces this preference to a 1.4σ effect. Inclusion of large scale structure data does not change the conclusion. If taken seriously, the low-k cutoff is correlated with optical depth so that reionization occurs even earlier than indicated by the WMAP analysis.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/37dd5bf3d114afda9a8ad07319bd872febb82f6b

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Citations in the corpus

Suppressing the lower multipoles in the CMB anisotropies (2003, result): “5 The authors of [49] erroneously compare our analysis to their”
Planck2018 results (2018, background): “which can be motivated by a short stage of inflation (Contaldi et al. 2003; Cline et al. 2003) (see also Kuhnel & Schwarz (2010), Hazra et al.”
Punctuated inflation and the low CMB multipoles (2008, background): “The scalar power spectrum with a drop in power at large scales is often approximated by an expression with an exponential cut off of the following form [18, 19, 25]:”
Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, background): “, [1177, 323, 403, 272, 546]) including the fact that the universe is expanding with different velocities along different directions.”