Reproducing the observed cosmic microwave background anisotropies with causal scaling seeds - art. no. 081301

During recent years it has become clear that global O(N) defects and U(1) c osmic strings do not lead to the pronounced first acoustic peak in the powe r spectrum of anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) which h as recently been observed to high accuracy. Inflationary models cannot easi ly accommodate the low second peak indicated by the data. Here we construct causal scaling seed models which reproduce the first and second peak. Futu re, more precise CMB anisotropy and polarization experiments will however b e able to distinguish them from the ordinary adiabatic models.