Related papers: Probing the power spectrum bend with recent CMB da…
We revisit the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) constraints on the spatial curvature of the Universe, assessing how they change when the curvature parameter and the primordial inflationary scalar spectrum are treated consistently within…
Thermal inflation is a second epoch of exponential expansion at typical energy scales $V^{1/4} \sim 10^{6 \sim 8} \mathrm{GeV}$. If the usual primordial inflation is followed by thermal inflation, the primordial power spectrum is only…
We investigate an inflationary model of the universe based on the assumption that space-time is noncommutative in the very early universe. We analyze the effects of space-time noncommutativity on the quantum fluctuations of an inflaton…
[Abridged] A sharp cut-off in the primordial scalar power spectrum on large scales has been known to improve the fit to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data when compared to the more standard, nearly scale invariant power spectrum…
We investigate a spatially-flat cold dark matter model (with the matter density parameter $\Omega_m=0.3$) with a primordial feature in the initial power spectrum. We assume that there is a bump in the power spectrum of density fluctuations…
Standard CMB analysis assumes a direct deterministic mapping between the multipole probed by the CMB $\ell$ and the primordial wavenumber $k$. Since the recombination era has a finite duration, this mapping is probabilistic by construction.…
We update the constraints on possible features in the primordial inflationary density perturbation spectrum by using the latest data from the WMAP7 and ACT Cosmic Microwave Background experiments. The inclusion of new data significantly…
Recent analysis of the WMAP and Planck data have shown the presence of a dip and a bump in the spectrum of primordial perturbations at the scales $k=0.002$ Mpc${}^{-1}$ and $k=0.0035$ Mpc${}^{-1}$ respectively. We analyze for the first time…
We investigate the question of how tightly we can constrain the cosmological parameters by using the ``cosmic inversion'' method in which we directly reconstruct the power spectrum of primordial curvature perturbations, $P(k)$, from the…
We report the most complete analysis to date of observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) obtained during the 1998 flight of BOOMERANG. We use two quite different methods to determine the angular power spectrum of the CMB in 20…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) determinations of the baryon-to-photon ratio $\eta \propto \Omega_{\rm baryon} h^2$ will remove the last free parameter from (standard) big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) calculations. This will make BBN a much…
We analyze the possibility of using observational data on nearby dwarf galaxies -- their luminosity functions and spatial distributions -- to constrain deviations of the cosmological power spectrum from the standard one. Specifically, we…
The primordial power spectrum of matter density perturbations contains highly valuable information about new fundamental physics, in particular cosmological inflation, but is only very weakly constrained observationally for small…
The {\em Planck} DR3 measurements of the temperature and polarization anisotropies power spectra of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) show an excess of smoothing of the acoustic peaks with respect to $\Lambda$CDM, often quantified by a…
We extend an alternative, phenomenological approach to inflation by means of an equation of state and a sound speed, both of them functions of the number of $e$-folds and four phenomenological parameters. This approach captures a number of…
The usual inflationary scenario predicts a Gaussian random primordial density fluctuation, different Fourier modes of which do not correlate with each other. In this paper we propose a correlation between these different modes. A simple…
We present a minimally parametric, model independent reconstruction of the shape of the primordial power spectrum. Our smoothing spline technique is well-suited to search for smooth features such as deviations from scale invariance, and…
Certain anomalies in the CMB bring out a tension between the six-parameter flat $\Lambda$CDM model and the CMB data. We revisit the PLANCK analysis with loop quantum cosmology (LQC) predictions and show that LQC alleviates both the…
We report the first results from the BOOMERanG experiment, which mapped at 90, 150, 240 and 410 GHz a wide (3%) region of the microwave sky with minimal local contamination. From the data of the best 150 GHz detector we find evidence for a…
We study the power spectrum of the mass density perturbations in an inflation scenario that includes thermal dissipation. We show that the condition on which the thermal fluctuations dominate the primordial density perturbations can easily…