CMB anomalies and the effects of local features of the inflaton potential

Alexander Gallego Cadavid; Antonio Enea Romano; Stefano Gariazzo

doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-017-4797-6

2022 Impact factor 4.4

Particles and Fields

Open Access

Eur. Phys. J. C (2017) 77: 242
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-017-4797-6

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

CMB anomalies and the effects of local features of the inflaton potential

Alexander Gallego Cadavid¹^,5^,6, Antonio Enea Romano¹^,2^,6^* and Stefano Gariazzo²^,3^,4

¹ Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
² Department of Physics, University of Torino, Via P. Giuria 1, 10125, Turin, Italy
³ INFN, Sezione di Torino, Via P. Giuria 1, 10125, Turin, Italy
⁴ Instituto de Física Corpuscular (CSIC-Universitat de València), Paterna, Valencia, Spain
⁵ ICRANet, Piazza della Repubblica 10, 65122, Pescara, Italy
⁶ Instituto de Fisica, Universidad de Antioquia, A.A.1226, Medellin, Colombia

^* e-mail: antonio.enea.romano@cern.ch

Received: 8 November 2016
Accepted: 28 March 2017
Published online: 13 April 2017

Abstract

Recent analysis of the WMAP and Planck data have shown the presence of a dip and a bump in the spectrum of primordial perturbations at the scales Mpc and Mpc, respectively. We analyze for the first time the effects of a local feature in the inflaton potential to explain the observed deviations from scale invariance in the primordial spectrum. We perform a best-fit analysis of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation temperature and polarization data. The effects of the features can improve the agreement with observational data respect to the featureless model. The best-fit local feature affects the primordial curvature spectrum mainly in the region of the bump, leaving the spectrum unaffected on other scales.