Exploring early and late cosmology with next generation surveys

Abstract

Perturbations from inflation evolve into large scale structure of the late universe, and encode abundant cosmic structure formation physics. We allow freedom in the primordial power spectrum, rather than assuming a power law scale dependence, to study its impact on cosmological parameter determination. Combining various generations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) data and galaxy redshift survey data, we investigate the constraints on reconstruction of the primordial curvature perturbation power spectrum and the late time cosmology, especially the sum of neutrino masses. We quantify how each successive generation, in CMB and galaxy surveys, provides significant improvements, often by factors of several. By using CMB polarization information over a broad range of angular scales, and galaxy redshift data in many bins of redshift, one can allow inflationary freedom and still constrain parameters comparably to assuming power law dependence. The primordial power spectrum can be reconstructed at the subpercent level in a dozen wavenumber bins, while simultaneously fitting the sum of neutrino masses to 14 meV.