The WMAP normalization of inflationary cosmologies

Abstract

We use the three-year WMAP observations to determine the normalization of the matter power spectrum in inflationary cosmologies. In this context, the quantity of interest is not the normalization marginalized over all parameters, but rather the normalization as a function of the inflationary parameters n and r with marginalization over the remaining cosmological parameters. We compute this normalization and provide an accurate fitting function. The statistical uncertainty in the normalization is 3 percent, roughly half that achieved by COBE. We use the k-l relation for the standard cosmological model to identify the pivot scale for the WMAP normalization. We also quote the inflationary energy scale corresponding to the WMAP normalization.