On quantifying and resolving the BICEP2/Planck tension over gravitational waves
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
2014-07-24 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
High Energy Physics - Theory
Abstract
The recent BICEP2 measurement of primordial gravity waves (r = 0.2^{+0.07}_{-0.05}) appears to be in tension with the upper limit from WMAP (r<0.13 at 95% CL) and Planck (r<0.11 at 95% CL). We carefully quantify the level of tension and show that it is very significant (around 0.1% unlikely) when the observed deficit of large-scale temperature power is taken into account. We show that measurements of TE and EE power spectra in the near future will discriminate between the hypotheses that this tension is either a statistical fluke, or a sign of new physics. We also discuss extensions of the standard cosmological model that relieve the tension, and some novel ways to constrain them.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1404.0373,
title = {On quantifying and resolving the BICEP2/Planck tension over gravitational waves},
author = {Kendrick M. Smith and Cora Dvorkin and Latham Boyle and Neil Turok and Mark Halpern and Gary Hinshaw and Ben Gold},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.0373},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
v2: minor changes matching PRL published version