Recently is has been suggested that the dearth of small halos around the Milky Way arises due to a modification of the primordial power spectrum of fluctuations from inflation. Such modifications would be expected to alter the formation of structure from bottom-up to top-down on scales near where the short-scale power has been suppressed. Using cosmological simulations we study the effects of s...

The latest cosmological data seem to indicate a significant deviation from scale invariance of the primordial power spectrum when parameterized either by a power law or by a spectral index with non-zero “running”. This deviation, by itself, serves as a powerful tool to discriminate among theories for the origin of cosmological structures such as inflationary models. Here, we use a minimally-par...