A Bayesian analysis of the primordial power spectrum

M. Bridges, A. N. Lasenby, M. P. Hobson

Published 2005-11-18, updated 2007-09-07Version 2

We present a Bayesian analysis of large-scale structure and cosmic microwave background data to constrain the form of the primordial power spectrum. We have extended the usual presumption of a scale invariant spectrum to include: (i) a running spectral index; (ii) a broken spectrum arising perhaps from an interruption of the potential driving inflation; (iii) a large scale cutoff in power as the first year WMAP results appear to indicate; (iv) a reconstruction of the spectrum in eight bins in wavenumber; and (v) a spectrum resulting from a cosmological model proposed by Lasenby & Doran, which naturally exhibits an exponential drop in power on very large scales. The result of our complete Bayesian analysis includes not only the posterior probability distribution from which parameter estimates are inferred but also the Bayesian evidence. This evidence value is greater for a model with fewer parameters unless a more complicated model provides a significantly better fit to the data, thus allowing a powerful method of model selection. We find that those models exhibiting any form of cutoff in power on large scales consistently produce higher evidences than either the Harrison-Zel'dovich or single spectral index spectra. In particular, within the best-fit concordance cosmology, we find the Lasenby & Doran spectrum to show significantly larger evidence as compared to the other models.