Low-$\ell$ power suppression in punctuated inflation [CEA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1610.05776


Motivated by Planck confirmation of an anomalously low value of the CMB temperature fluctuations up to multipole $\ell<40$, we in this paper try to explain such feature by investigating case of punctuated inflation scenario. This form of inflation potential is inspired by MSSM wherein suppression of curvature perturbation power at large scales is produced by introducing period of fast-roll phase of the inflation sandwiched between two stages of slow-roll phase.
We apply Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis to determine posterior distribution and the best fit values of the model parameters using recent WMAP9 and Planck data. We show that WMAP9 and Planck results are consistent with each other. We shown that the Planck data gives much tighter constraints for punctuated inflation parameters. We find that punctuated inflation leads to better fit in CMB data compared to simple power law model. For WMAP9 data the improvement in fit is marginal ($\Delta \chi^2\sim 4$), however, for WMAP9+Planck the improvement is significant ($\Delta \chi^2\sim 17$). We find that $AIC$ does not discriminate between punctuated inflation and simple power law model for WMAP9 data. However, for WMAP9+Planck data we find that punctuated inflation is strongly favored over a simple power law spectrum.

Read this paper on arXiv…

M. Qureshi, A. Iqbal, M. Malik, et. al.
Thu, 20 Oct 16
25/44

Comments: 18 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables, to be submitted to JCAP, comments welcome