First Observational Tests of Eternal Inflation

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Abstract

The eternal inflation scenario predicts that our observable universe resides inside a single bubble embedded in a vast inflating multiverse. We present the first observational tests of eternal inflation, performing a search for cosmological signatures of collisions with other bubble universes in cosmic microwave background data from the WMAP satellite. We conclude that the WMAP 7-year data do not warrant augmenting LCDM with bubble collisions, constraining the average number of detectable bubble collisions on the full sky to be less than 1.6 at 68% CL. Data from the Planck satellite can be used to more definitively test the bubble collision hypothesis.

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HEALPix -- a Framework for High Resolution Discretization, and Fast Analysis of Data Distributed on the Sphere

Benjamin WANDELT, A. J. Banday, F. K. Hansen … (2004)

HEALPix -- the Hierarchical Equal Area iso-Latitude Pixelization -- is a versatile data structure with an associated library of computational algorithms and visualization software that supports fast scientific applications executable directly on very large volumes of astronomical data and large area surveys in the form of discretized spherical maps. Originally developed to address the data processing and analysis needs of the present generation of cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments (e.g. BOOMERanG, WMAP), HEALPix can be expanded to meet many of the profound challenges that will arise in confrontation with the observational output of future missions and experiments, including e.g. Planck, Herschel, SAFIR, and the Beyond Einstein CMB polarization probe. In this paper we consider the requirements and constraints to be met in order to implement a sufficient framework for the efficient discretization and fast analysis/synthesis of functions defined on the sphere, and summarise how they are satisfied by HEALPix.

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MultiNest: an efficient and robust Bayesian inference tool for cosmology and particle physics

F Feroz, M. Hobson, M. Bridges (2008)

We present further development and the first public release of our multimodal nested sampling algorithm, called MultiNest. This Bayesian inference tool calculates the evidence, with an associated error estimate, and produces posterior samples from distributions that may contain multiple modes and pronounced (curving) degeneracies in high dimensions. The developments presented here lead to further substantial improvements in sampling efficiency and robustness, as compared to the original algorithm presented in Feroz & Hobson (2008), which itself significantly outperformed existing MCMC techniques in a wide range of astrophysical inference problems. The accuracy and economy of the MultiNest algorithm is demonstrated by application to two toy problems and to a cosmological inference problem focussing on the extension of the vanilla \(\Lambda\)CDM model to include spatial curvature and a varying equation of state for dark energy. The MultiNest software, which is fully parallelized using MPI and includes an interface to CosmoMC, is available at http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/software/multinest/. It will also be released as part of the SuperBayeS package, for the analysis of supersymmetric theories of particle physics, at http://www.superbayes.org

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Planckpre-launch status: ThePlanckmission

N. Ponthieu, P. Wilson, A. Woodcraft … (2010)

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Author and article information

Journal

Publication date Created: 09 December 2010

Publication date Updated: 2011-07-12

Article

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.071301

ArXiV ID: 1012.1995

SO-VID: dc1f5f8e-95e3-4c7c-b198-57d3ee182700

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http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

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Journal reference Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 071301 (2011)

Comments Companion to arXiv:1012.3667. 5 pages, 2 figures. v3: replaced with version accepted by PRL. Significant extensions to the Bayesian pipeline to do the full-sky non-Gaussian source detection problem (previously restricted to patches). Note that this has changed the normalization of evidence values reported previously, as full-sky priors are now employed, but the conclusions remain unchanged

Categories astro-ph.CO hep-ph hep-th

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