Features in the primordial power spectrum? A frequentist analysis

Understand

Features in the primordial power spectrum have been suggested as an explanation for glitches in the angular power spectrum of temperature anisotropies measured by the WMAP satellite.

• However, these glitches might just as well be artifacts of noise or cosmic variance.
• Using the effective Delta chi^2 between the best-fit power-law spectrum and a deconvolved primordial spectrum as a measure of "featureness" of the data, we perform a full Monte-Carlo analysis to address the question of how significant the recovered features are.
• We find that in 26% of the simulated data sets the reconstructed spectrum yields a greater improvement in the likelihood than for the actually observed data.