Constraints on the birth of the universe and origin of cosmic dark flow

TL;DR

This paper explores early universe constraints through three approaches: analyzing CMB power spectrum dips, potential inflation potential jumps, and dark flow constraints, offering insights into cosmic origins and inflationary processes.

Contribution

It introduces models linking CMB features to particle creation during inflation and assesses their implications for dark flow and cosmic origin constraints.

Findings

Resonant particle creation can explain CMB dip features.

Potential jumps during inflation may resolve dark flow issues.

Constraints on dark flow from supernova data are summarized.

Abstract

We summarize three recent efforts to constrain the first few moments of cosmic creation before and during the epoch of inflation. We consider two means to explain a slight dip in the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background for multipoles in the range of $\ell= 10-30$ from both the {\it Planck} and {\it WMAP} data. We show that such a dip could be the result of resonant creation of a massive particle that couples to the inflaton field. For best-fit models, the epoch of resonant particle creation reenters the horizon at wave numbers of $k_* \sim 0.00011 \pm 0.0004 $ ($h$ Mpc$^{-1}$). The amplitude and location of these features correspond to the creation of a number of degenerate fermion species of mass $\sim 15/\lambda^{3/2} $ $m_{pl}$ during inflation where $\lambda$ is the coupling constant between the inflaton field and the created fermion species. Alternatively, one can explain the existence of such a dip as due to a jump in the inflation generating potential. We show that such a jump can also resolve the excessively large dark flow predicted from the M-theory landscape. Finally, we summarize our efforts to quantify constraints on the cosmic dark flow from a new analysis of the Type Ia supernova distance-redshift relation.