Wiggles in the cosmic microwave background radiation: Echoes from nonsingular cyclic inflation

In this paper we consider a unique model of inflation where the universe undergoes rapid asymmetric oscillations, each cycle lasting ~10⁶ Planck times. Over many, many cycles the space-time expands to mimic the standard inflationary scenario. Moreover, these rapid oscillations leave a distinctive periodic signature in lnk in the primordial power spectrum, where k denotes the comoving scale. Although the cyclic-inflation model contains additional parameters as compared to the standard power-law spectrum, the improvement to the fit of the 7-year WMAP data is significant.