Hardwick, Robert J and Byrnes, Christian T (2015) Bayesian evidence of the post-Planck curvaton. JCAP, 2015. ISSN 1475-7516

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Abstract

We perform a Bayesian model comparison for scenarios within the quadratic curvaton model, determining the degree to which both are disfavoured with respect to the ΛCDM concordance model and single-field quadratic inflation, using the recent Planck data release. Despite having three additional model parameters, the simplest curvaton scenario is not disfavoured relative to single-field quadratic inflation, and it becomes favoured against this single-field model when we include the joint BICEP/Keck/Planck analysis. In all cases we assume an instantaneous inflaton decay and no surviving isocurvature perturbations. Despite the success of Planck reaching its forecast measurement accuracy, we show that the current constraints on local non-Gaussianity are insufficiently precise to have any significant impact on the evidence ratios so far. We also determine the precision σ(fNL) required by future measurements assuming a fiducial value of fNL = −5/4 or 10.8 to no longer disfavour the curvaton against the ΛCDM parametrisation, and we discuss the effect that the predicted increase in precision from future measurements on fNL may have. We show that our results are not very sensitive to our choice of priors.

Item Type:	Article
Schools and Departments:	School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences > Physics and Astronomy
Subjects:	Q Science > QB Astronomy > QB0980 Cosmogony. Cosmology
Depositing User:	Christian Byrnes
Date Deposited:	08 Feb 2016 08:47
Last Modified:	02 Jul 2019 20:06
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/59575

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