Slow-Roll Inflation and Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy Data

Abstract

We emphasize that the estimation of cosmological parameters from cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data, such as the recent high-resolution maps from BOOMERanG and MAXIMA-1, requires assumptions about the primordial spectra. The latter are predicted from inflation. The physically best-motivated scenario is that of slow-roll inflation. However, very often, the unphysical power-law inflation scenario is (implicitly) assumed in the CMB data analysis. We show that the predicted multipole moments differ significantly in both cases. We identify several misconceptions that are present in the literature (and in the way inflationary relations are often combined in popular numerical codes). For example, we do not believe that, generically, inflation predicts the relation nS - 1 = nT for the spectral indices of scalar and tensor perturbations or that gravitational waves are negligible. We calculate the CMB multipole moments for various values of the slow-roll parameters and demonstrate that an important part of the space of parameters (nS, nT) has been overlooked in the CMB data analysis so far.