Punctuated inflation and the low CMB multipoles
- Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Chhatnag Road, Jhunsi, Allahabad 211 019 (India)
- Korea Institute for Advanced Study, 207-43 Cheongnyangni 2-dong, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul 130-722 (Korea, Republic of)
- Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1150 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706-1390 (United States)
- IUCAA, Post Bag 4, Ganeshkhind, Pune 411 007 (India)
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, {chi}{sub eff}{sup 2} improves by 6.62) of the observed data when compared to the best fit reference {Lambda}CDM model with a featureless, power law, primordial spectrum.
- OSTI ID:
- 22156848
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2009, Issue 01; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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