Back to the features: assessing the discriminating power of future CMB missions on inflationary models

Understand

Future Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments will deliver extremely accurate measurements of the E-modes pattern of the CMB polarization field.

• Given the sharpness of the E-modes transfer functions, such surveys make for a powerful detector of high-frequency signals from primordial features that may be lurking in current data sets.
• With a handful of toy models that increase the fit to the latest Planck data, but are of marginal statistical significance, we use a state-of-the-art forecast pipeline to illustrate the promising prospects to test primordial features in the next decade.
• Not only will future experiments allow us to detect such features in data, but they will also be able to discriminate between models and narrow down the physical mechanism originating them with high statistical significance.