Deblurring the early Universe: reconstruction of primordial power spectrum from Planck CMB using image analysis techniques

Abstract

Abstract While the simplest inflationary models predict the primordial perturbations to be near scale-invariant, the primordial power spectrum (PPS) can exhibit oscillatory features in many physically well-motivated models. We search for hints of such features via free-form reconstructions of the PPS based on Planck 2018 CMB temperature and polarization anisotropies. In order to robustly invert the oscillatory integrals and handle noisy unbinned data, we draw inspiration from image analysis techniques. In previous works, the Richardson-Lucy deconvolution algorithm for deblurring images has been modified for reconstructing PPS from the CMB temperature angular power spectrum. We extensively develop the methodology by including CMB polarization and introducing two new regularization techniques, also inspired by image analysis and adapted for our cosmological context. Regularization is essential for improving the fit to the temperature and polarization channels (TT, TE and EE) simultaneously without sacrificing one for another. The reconstructions we obtain are consistent with previous findings from temperature-only analyses. We evaluate the statistical significance of the oscillatory features in our reconstructions using mock data and find the observations to be consistent with having a featureless PPS. The machinery developed here will be a complimentary tool in the search for features with upcoming CMB surveys. Our methodology also shows competitive performance in image deconvolution tasks, which have various applications from microscopy to medical imaging.