Punctuated inflation and the low CMB multipoles

By R. K. Jain, P. Chingangbam, Jinn-Ouk Gong, L. Sriramkumar, T. Souradeep. 2008

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate inflationary scenarios driven by a class of potentials which are similar in form to those that arise in certain minimal supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. We find that these potentials allow a brief period of departure from inflation sandwiched between two stages of slow roll inflation. We show that such a background behavior leads to a step like feature in the scalar power spectrum. We set the scales such that the drop in the power spectrum occurs at a length scale that corresponds to the Hubble radius today — a feature that seems necessary to explain the lower power observed in the quadrupole moment of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies. We perform a Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis to determine the values of the model parameters that provide the best fit to the recent WMAP 5-year data for the CMB angular power spectrum. We find that an inflationary spectrum with a suppression of power at large scales that we obtain leads to a much better fit (with just one extra parameter, χeff2 improves by 6.62) of the observed data when compared to the best fit reference ΛCDM model with a featureless, power law, primordial spectrum.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6c0120b74d02ad15c4e806c36523a4ba3b99f575

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Citations in the corpus

Correlation functions in stochastic inflation (2015, background): “This is the case, for example, when the potential has a flat inflection point, such as in MSSM inflation [62– 64] or as in punctuated inflation [65,66].”