Primordial power spectrum from WMAP

Arman Shafieloo, Tarun Souradeep

Published 2003-12-06, updated 2004-05-21Version 3

The observed angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropy, $C_l$, is a convolution of a cosmological radiative transport kernel with an assumed primordial power spectrum of inhomogeneities. Exquisite measurements of $C_l$ over a wide range of multipoles from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has opened up the possibility to deconvolve the primordial power spectrum for a given set of cosmological parameters (base model). We implement an improved (error sensitive) Richardson-Lucy deconvolution algorithm on the measured angular power spectrum from WMAP assuming a concordance cosmological model. The most prominent feature of the recovered $P(k)$ is a sharp, infra-red cut off on the horizon scale. The resultant $C_l$ spectrum using the recovered spectrum has a likelihood far better than a scale invariant, or, `best fit' scale free spectra ($\Delta\ln{\cal L}=25$ {\it w.r.t.} Harrison Zeldovich, and, $\Delta\ln{\cal L}=11$ {\it w.r.t.} power law with $n_s=0.95$). The recovered $P(k)$ has a localized excess just below the cut-off which leads to great improvement of likelihood over the simple monotonic forms of model infra-red cut-off spectra considered in the post WMAP literature. The recovered $P(k)$, in particular, the form of infra-red cut-off is robust to small changes in the cosmological parameters. We show that remarkably similar form of infra-red cutoff is known to arise in very reasonable extensions and refinements of the predictions from simple inflationary scenarios. Our method can be extended to other cosmological observations such as the measured matter power spectrum and, in particular, the much awaited polarization spectrum from WMAP.