Low-l power suppression in punctuated inflation

Motivated by Planck confirmation of an anomalously low value of the CMB temperature fluctuations up to multipole l < 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 Minimal Super-symmetric Standard Model (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 fi t values of the model parameters using recent WMAP9 and Planck data. We show that WMAP9 and Planck results are consistent with each other and that with Planck data we obtain tighter constraints for punctuated inflation parameters. We fi nd that punctuated inflation leads to better fi t in CMB data compared to simple power law model. The improvement in the fi t to the WMAP9 data is Delta x(2) similar to 3.6 and for Planck the improvement is Delta x(2) similar to 5.4. We fi nd that A I C does not discriminate between punctuated inflation and simple power law model for WMAP9 data. However, for Planck data we fi nd that punctuated inflation is moderately preferred over a simple power law model.