We investigate the effect of allowing freedom in the primordial power spectrum of curvature perturbations upon the measurement of other cosmological parameters, in particular the Thomson optical depth due to cosmic reionisation which is present in cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations. We find that the constraint on the optical depth from Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data broadens by approximately 10% upon allowing spectral freedom on large scales, and by a slightly larger factor when considering data from future experiments with lower noise in measurements of CMB polarisation. We also present a reconstruction of the primordial power spectrum on the largest scales from WMAP, which is jointly obtained from this analysis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.112315 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Van Engelen, Alexander. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Physics.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002763869, proquestno: AAIMR51352, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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