A Method to Estimate the Primordial Power Spectrum from CMB Data

Rafael Bautista, Sergio Torres

Published 1995-11-15, updated 1996-04-21Version 2

A precise determination of the primordial spectrum of matter density fluctuations at super-horizon scales is essential in understanding large scale structure in the universe. Attempts to constrain or obtain the primordial spectrum using data on cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies has relied on statistical and correlation analyses that assume a power-law spectrum. We propose a method to derive $P(k)$ directly from the CMB angular power spectrum which does not presuppose the need to know anything about its functional form. The method consists of a direct inversion of the Sachs-Wolfe formula. Using this new analysis technique and COBE data we obtain an empirical $P(k)$ which 1) supports a power-law parameterization and 2) has an amplitude and spectral index consistent with previous analyses of the same data. We obtained for the spectral index, $n=1.52 \pm 0.4$ when the 2nd year COBE data is used and $n=1.22 \pm 0.3$ using the 4 year data set.