Inflationary gravity waves in light of recent cosmic microwave background anisotropies data -: art. no. 021501

One of the major predictions of inflation is the existence of a stochastic background of cosmological gravitational waves (GW). These gravitational waves can induce significant temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) on the angular scales recently probed by the Archeops experiment. Here, we perform a combined analysis of Archeops together with information from other CMB experiments and/or cosmological data sets, in order to constrain the amplitude of the GW background. We find that, for a scale-invariant GW background, the ratio of tensor-scalar perturbations at the CMB quadrupole is now constrained to be rless than or equal to0.43 at 95% C.L., while the bound on the spectral index of primordial density fluctuations is n(S)=0.97(-0.12)(+0.10). We discuss the implications for future GW detections through CMB polarization measurements.