New Constraints on inflation from the Cosmic Microwave Background

William H. Kinney, Alessandro Melchiorri, Antonio Riotto

Published 2000-07-25, updated 2000-08-03Version 2

The recent data from the Boomerang and MAXIMA-1 balloon flights have marked the beginning of the precision era of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy (CMB) measurements. We investigate the observational constraints from the current CMB anisotropy measurements on the simplest inflation models, characterized by a single scalar field $\phi$, in the parameter space consisting of scalar spectral index $n_S$ and tensor/scalar ratio $r$. If we include constraints on the baryon density from big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), we show that the favored inflationary models have negligible tensor amplitude and a ``red'' tilt, with a best fit of $n_S \simeq 0.93$, which is consistent with the simplest ``small-field'' inflation models, but rules out large-field models at the $1\sigma$ level. Without including BBN constraints, a broader range of models are consistent with the data. The best fit (assuming negligible reionization) is a scale-invariant spectrum, $n_S \simeq 1$, which includes large-field and hybrid scenarios. Large-field models (such as chaotic and power-law inflation) with tilt $n_S < 0.9$ are strongly disfavored in all cases.