Bounds on Cosmic Inflation tagged posts

Physicists looking for signs of primordial gravitational waves by sifting through the earliest light in the cosmos – the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – have reported their findings: still nothing.

But far from being a dud, the latest results from the BICEP3 experiment at the South Pole have tightened the bounds on models of cosmic inflation, a process that in theory explains several perplexing features of our universe and which should have produced gravitational waves shortly after the universe began.

“Once-promising models of inflation are now ruled out,” said Chao-Lin Kuo, a BICEP3 principal investigator and a physicist at Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laborato...