English

Determining Cosmological Parameters from the Microwave Background

Astrophysics 2009-10-28 v2

Abstract

Recently funded satellites will map the cosmic microwave background radiation with unprecedented sensitivities and angular resolutions. Assuming only primordial adiabatic scalar and tensor perturbations, we evaluate how accurately experiments of this type will measure the basic cosmological parameters Ω\Omega (the total density of the Universe), Ωb\Omega_b (the baryon density), hh (the Hubble constant), and Λ\Lambda (the cosmological constant). The proposed experiments are capable of measuring these parameters at the few-percent level. We briefly discuss the generality of these estimates and complications arising in actual data analysis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9605147,
  title  = {Determining Cosmological Parameters from the Microwave Background},
  author = {Arthur Kosowsky and Marc Kamionkowski and Gerard Jungman and David N. Spergel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9605147},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

To appear in Proceedings of the UCLA Dark Matter '96 conference. 7 pages Revtex, 1 figure. Revised version includes recalculation for sensitivities corresponding to MAP and COBRAS/SAMBA, as well as slightly more specific discussion of these two experiments