BICEP2 Results: “[F]irst direct evidence of cosmic inflation”

Abstract

At a presentation from the Harvard-Smithsonian, the BICEP2 team has announced that they have the “first direct evidence of cosmic inflation”. As rumoured they have detected what they believe to be primordial gravitational waves with a ratio or tensor to scalar modes of r=0.2 (+0.07 -0.05) which is 5 sigma over the null hypothesis.