Tightening constraints on primordial oscillations with latest ACT and SPT data

TL;DR

This paper uses the latest ACT and SPT CMB data to place the most stringent constraints yet on primordial oscillations in the power spectrum, finding no evidence for such features and demonstrating the effectiveness of ground-based experiments in probing early universe physics.

Contribution

It provides the first tight constraints on primordial oscillations using combined ACT, SPT, and Planck data, improving previous bounds significantly.

Findings

No detection of primordial oscillations in the data.

Combined datasets tighten the upper bounds on oscillation amplitudes.

Ground-based CMB experiments are powerful in constraining early universe models.

Abstract

The oscillation feature in primordial power spectrum (PPS), a fingerprint of not only a wide class of models of inflation but new physics, is of significant theoretical interest, and can be imprinted on the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In this work, we present constraints on periodic oscillations in the PPS using the latest ACT DR6 and SPT-3G D1 CMB data with the precise measurements at high multipoles beyond the Planck angular resolution and sensitivity. It is found that the combination of SPT and ACT with Planck CMB dataset significantly tightens the upper bound to $A_\mathrm{log,lin}\lesssim 0.029$ at $95\%$ C.L., showing no hint for primordial oscillations, where $A_\mathrm{log,lin}$ are the amplitudes of logarithmic and linear oscillation in the PPS, respectively. Our work presents state-of-the-art CMB constraints on primordial oscillations, highlighting the power of the ground-based CMB experiments in constraining physics beyond the simplest slow-roll models.