English

Testing for double inflation with WMAP

Astrophysics 2011-07-19 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

With the WMAP data we can now begin to test realistic models of inflation involving multiple scalar fields. These naturally lead to correlated adiabatic and isocurvature (entropy) perturbations with a running spectral index. We present the first full (9 parameter) likelihood analysis of double inflation with WMAP data and find that despite the extra freedom, supersymmetric hybrid potentials are strongly constrained with less than 7% correlated isocurvature component allowed when standard priors are imposed on the cosomological parameters. As a result we also find that Akaike & Bayesian model selection criteria rather strongly prefer single-field inflation, just as equivalent analysis prefers a cosmological constant over dynamical dark energy in the late universe. It appears that simplicity is the best guide to our universe.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0409071,
  title  = {Testing for double inflation with WMAP},
  author = {David Parkinson and Shinji Tsujikawa and Bruce A. Bassett and Luca Amendola},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0409071},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

7 pages, 6 figures