Primordial power spectrum from Planck

Abstract

Using modified Richardson-Lucy algorithm we reconstruct the primordial power spectrum (PPS) from Planck Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropy data. In our analysis we use different combinations of angular power spectra from Planck to reconstruct the shape of the primordial power spectrum and locate possible features. Performing an extensive error analysis we found the dip near ℓ ~ 750–850 represents the most prominent feature in the data. Feature near ℓ ~ 1800–2000 is detectable with high confidence only in 217 GHz spectrum and is apparently consequence of a small systematic as described in the revised Planck 2013 papers. Fixing the background cosmological parameters and the foreground nuisance parameters to their best fit baseline values, we report that the best fit power law primordial power spectrum is consistent with the reconstructed form of the PPS at 2σ C.L. of the estimated errors (apart from the local features mentioned above). As a consistency test, we found the reconstructed primordial power spectrum from Planck temperature data can also substantially improve the fit to WMAP-9 angular power spectrum data (with respect to power-law form of the PPS) allowing an overall amplitude shift of ~ 2.5%. In this context low-ℓ and 100 GHz spectrum from Planck which have proper overlap in the multipole range with WMAP data found to be completely consistent with WMAP-9 (allowing amplitude shift). As another important result of our analysis we do report the evidence of gravitational lensing through the reconstruction analysis. Finally we present two smooth form of the PPS containing only the important features. These smooth forms of PPS can provide significant improvements in fitting the data (with respect to the power law PPS) and can be helpful to give hints for inflationary model building.