Document Type

Honors Project On-Campus Access Only

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advisor: Professor Tonnis ter Veldhuis

Abstract

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation encodes invaluable information about types of space-time distortions the universe experienced during its early inflationary epoch. This research draws upon data from the Planck Satellite to characterize the non-Gaussianity of the CMB fluctuations—in other words, the extent to which the fluctuations are independent at different angular scales. It then proposes a model of cosmological inflation based on coupled scalar fields that accounts for appreciable non-Gaussianity and illustrates how the constraining the parameter space of the model forces it to comply with the measured non-Gaussianity.

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