• DOI:10.1016/S0370-2693(03)00757-3
• Corpus ID: 119062633

WMAP and inflation

@article{Barger2003WMAPAI,
  title={WMAP and inflation},
  author={Vernon Barger and Hye-Sung Lee and Danny Marfatia},
  journal={Physics Letters B},
  year={2003},
  volume={565},
  pages={33-41}
}

• V. Barger, Hye-Sung Lee, D. Marfatia
• Published 18 February 2003
• Physics
• Physics Letters B

Abstract We assay how inflationary models whose properties are dominated by the dynamics of a single scalar field are constrained by cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). We classify inflationary models in a plane defined by the horizon-flow parameters. Our approach differs from that of the WMAP Collaboration in that we analyze only WMAP data and take the spectral shapes from slow-roll inflation rather than power-law parameterizations of the spectra. The only other information we use is the measurement of  h from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Key Project. We find that the spectral index of primordial density perturbations lies in the 1 σ range 0.94⩽ n s ⩽1.04 with no evidence of running. The ratio of the amplitudes of tensor and scalar perturbations is smaller than 0.61 and the inflationary scale is below 2.8×10 16  GeV, both at the 2 σ C.L. No class of inflation or ekpyrotic/cyclic model is excluded. The λφ 4 potential is excluded at 3 σ only if the number of e-folds is assumed to be less than 45.