English

Pre-Inflationary Relics in the CMB?

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2015-12-14 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

String Theory and Supergravity allow, in principle, to follow the transition of the inflaton from pre-inflationary fast roll to slow roll. This introduces an infrared depression in the primordial power spectrum that might have left an imprint in the CMB anisotropy, if it occurred at accessible wavelengths. We model the effect extending Λ\LambdaCDM with a scale Δ\Delta related to the infrared depression and explore the constraints allowed by {\sc Planck} data, employing also more conservative, wider Galactic masks in the low resolution CMB likelihood. In an extended mask with fsky=39%f_{sky}=39\%, we thus find Δ=(0.351±0.114)×103\mboxMpc1\Delta = (0.351 \pm 0.114) \times 10^{-3} \, \mbox{Mpc}^{-1}, at 99.4%99.4\% confidence level, to be compared with a nearby value at 88.5%88.5\% with the standard fsky=94%f_{sky}=94\% mask. With about 64 ee--folds of inflation, these values for Δ\Delta would translate into primordial energy scales O(1014){\cal O}(10^{14}) GeV.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1508.00411,
  title  = {Pre-Inflationary Relics in the CMB?},
  author = {A. Gruppuso and N. Kitazawa and N. Mandolesi and P. Natoli and A. Sagnotti},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.00411},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

16 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. Final version to appear in Physics of the Dark Universe. Contains: more detailed discussion of galactic masking, improved estimate