Euclid : The search for primordial features

The delensing of cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps will be increasingly valuable for extracting as much information as possible from future CMB surveys. Delensing provides many general benefits, including sharpening of the acoustic peaks, more accurate recovery of the damping tail, and reduction of lensing-induced B-mode power. In this paper we present several applications of delensing focused on testing theories of early-universe inflation with observations of the CMB. We find that delensing the CMB results in improved parameter constraints for reconstructing the spectrum of primordial curvature fluctuations, probing oscillatory features in the primordial curvature spectrum, measuring the spatial curvature of the universe, and constraining several different models of isocurvature perturbations. In some cases we find that delensing can recover almost all of the constraining power contained in unlensed spectra, and it will be a particularly valuable analysis technique to achieve further improvements in constraints for model parameters whose measurements are not expected to improve significantly when utilizing only lensed CMB maps from next-generation CMB surveys. We also quantify the prospects of testing the single-field inflation tensor consistency condition using delensed CMB data; we find it to be out of reach of current and proposed experimental technology and advocate for alternative detection methods.

Improving constraints on inflation with CMB delensing

Trendafilova,

Hotinli,

Meyers

2024

Bayesian inference methodology for primordial power spectrum reconstructions from Large Scale Structure

Martínez-Somonte,

Marcos-Caballero,

Martínez-González

et al. 2024

Self Cite

We use Bayesian inference to develop a non-parametric method to reconstruct the primordial power spectrum Pℛ (k) from Large Scale Structure (LSS) data. The performance of the method is assessed by testing it against simulations of the clustering of high-z (QSOs) objects. Their clustering is derived from different templates of the primordial power spectrum motivated by models of inflation: the Standard Model power law characterized by the two parameters As and ns ; a local feature template; and a global oscillatory template. The primordial power spectrum is reconstructed using N knots in the log {k, Pℛ (k)} plane while sampling the cosmological parameters {H 0, Ω b , Ω c }. We use two statistical tests to examine the reconstructions for signs of primordial features: a global test comparing the evidences and a novel local test quantifying the power of the hypothesis test between the power law model and the marginalized probability over N model. We also discuss results of an application to low-z (ELGs) objects with two different photometric errors keeping the cosmology fixed. The method shows good performance in all scenarios considered. In particular, the tests show no feature detection for the standard power-law primordial power spectrum; yet, the method is able to detect power spectrum deviations at a percent level for all considered features, combining either the low-z or the high-z redshift bins. In addition, we include a test proof-of-concept application to real data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Luminous Red Galaxy Data Release 4 (SDSS LRG 04), finding no preference for deviations from the primordial power law. The method is flexible, model independent, and suitable for its application to existing and future LSS surveys.

Fingerprints of a non-inflationary universe from massive fields

Quintin,

Chen,

Ebadi

2024

We construct explicit models of classical primordial standard clocks in an alternative to inflation, namely the slowly contracting ekpyrotic scenario. We study the phenomenology of massive spectator fields added to a state-of-the-art ekpyrotic model, with coupling functions that allow for these heavy fields to be classically excited while the background is slowly contracting. We perform numerical computations of the corrections to the scalar primordial power spectrum and compare with analytical estimates. Our full numerical results reveal so-called clock signals, sharp feature signals, as well as signals that link the two together. The models are found to predict oscillatory features that are resolutely different from what is calculated in inflation, and thus, such features represent unique fingerprints of a slowly contracting universe. This confirms the capability of primordial standard clocks to model-independently discriminate among very early universe scenarios.