Adiabatic CDM Models and the Competition

Abstract

The inflation-inspired flat, cold dark matter-dominated models of structure formation with adiabatic, nearly scale-invariant initial conditions agree very well with current CMB anisotropy data. The success of these models is highlighted by the failure of alternatives; we argue that there are no longer any viable competitors (with the exception of models with more complicated matter content which are still flat and which still require inflation). CMB data will soon be of sufficient quality that, if one {\it assumes} inflation, one can detect a non-zero cosmological constant by combining a determination of the peak location with Hubble constant measurements.