Constraint on inflation model from BICEP2 and WMAP 9-year data

Abstract

Even though Planck data released in 2013 (P13) is not compatible with Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (B2) and some local cosmological observations, including Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) samples and $H_0$ prior from Hubble Space Telescope (HST) etc, Wilkinson Microwaves Anisotropy Probe 9-year data (W9) is consistent with all of them in the base six-parameter $\Lambda$CDM+tensor cosmology quite well. In this letter, we adopt the combinations of B2+W9 and B2+W9+SNLS+BAO+HST to constrain the cosmological parameters in the base six-parameter $\Lambda$CDM+tensor model with $n_t=-r/8$, where r and $n_t$ are the tensor-to-scalar ratio and the tilt of relic gravitational wave spectrum, and BAO denotes Baryon Acoustic Oscillation. We find that the Harrison-Zel'dovich (HZ) scale invariant scalar power spectrum is consistent with both data combinations, chaotic inflation is marginally disfavored by the data at around $2\sigma$ level, but the power-law inflation model and the inflation model with inverse power-law potential can fit the data nicely.