Prospects for measuring Inflation parameters with the CMB

Abstract

We present the status of our study into the feasibility of estimating the parameters of inflation from planned satellite observations of the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).We describe a perturbative procedure for studying inflation models with soft departures from scale free spectra and find that in this case the parameters of inflation are likely to be well determined. We also demonstrate that radical departures from scale free initial perturbations with broad features in $k$-space can be be measured by Planck. However, allowing for very fine features in $k$-space can very strongly compromise the ability to measure cosmological parameters.