Sharp features in the primordial power spectrum are a powerful window into the inflationary epoch. To date, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has offered the most sensitive avenue to search for these signatures. In this paper, we demonstrate the power of large-scale structure observations to surpass the CMB as a probe of primordial features. We show that the signatures in galaxy surveys can be separated from the broadband power spectrum and are as robust to the nonlinear evolution of matter as the standard baryon acoustic oscillations. As a result, analyses can exploit a significant range of scales beyond the linear regime available in the datasets. We develop a feature search for large-scale structure, apply it to BOSS DR12 data and find new bounds on oscillatory features that exceed the sensitivity of Planck for a significant range of frequencies. Moreover, we forecast that the next generation of galaxy surveys, such as DESI and Euclid, will be able to improve current constraints by up to an order of magnitude over an expanded frequency range. References 517 This result has also been independently derived in [43] using ω log 1 as an expansion parameter. 8 These findings are also confirmed by analyses of N -body simulations performed in [44].

The existence of the cosmic neutrino background is a fascinating prediction of the hot big bang model. These neutrinos were a dominant component of the energy density in the early universe and, therefore, played an important role in the evolution of cosmological perturbations. The energy density of the cosmic neutrino background has been measured using the abundances of light elements and the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). A complementary and more robust probe is a distinct shift in the temporal phase of sound waves in the primordial plasma which is produced by fluctuations in the neutrino density and has recently been detected in the CMB. In this paper, we report on the first constraint on this neutrino-induced phase shift in the spectrum of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) of the BOSS DR12 data. Constraining the acoustic scale using Planck data while marginalizing over the effects of neutrinos in the CMB, we find a non-zero phase shift at greater than 95% confidence. We also demonstrate the robustness of this result in simulations and forecasts. Besides providing a new test of the cosmic neutrino background, our work is the first application of the BAO signal to early universe physics and a non-trivial confirmation of the standard cosmological history.

We assess the uncertainty with which a balloon-borne experiment, nominally called Tau Surveyor (τS), can measure the optical depth to reionization σ(τ) with given realistic constraints of instrument noise and foreground emissions. Using a τS fiducial design with six frequency bands between 150 and 380 GHz, with white and uniform map noise of 7 μK arcmin, achievable with a single midlatitude flight, and including Planck's 30 and 44 GHz data, we assess the error σ(τ) obtained with three foreground models and as a function of sky fraction f sky between 40% and 54%. We carry out the analysis using both parametric and blind foreground separation techniques. We compare the σ(τ) values to those obtained with low-frequency and high-frequency versions of the experiment called τS-lf and τS-hf, which have only four and up to eight frequency bands with narrower and wider frequency coverage, respectively. We find that with τS, the lowest constraint is σ(τ) = 0.0034, obtained for one of the foreground models with f sky = 54%. σ(τ) is larger, in some cases by more than a factor of 2, for smaller sky fractions, with τS-lf, or as a function of foreground model. The τS-hf configuration does not lead to significantly tighter constraints. The exclusion of the 30 and 44 GHz data, which give information about synchrotron emission, leads to significant τ misestimates. Decreasing noise by an ambitious factor of 10, while keeping f sky = 40%, gives σ(τ) = 0.0031. The combination of σ(τ) = 0.0034, baryon acoustic oscillation data from DESI, and future cosmic microwave background B-mode lensing data from the CMB-S3/CMB-S4 experiments could give σ(∑m ν ) = 17 meV.