Suppression of long-wavelength CMB spectrum from the Hartle-Hawking wave function in Starobinsky-type inflation model

TL;DR

This paper explores how the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal can lead to suppression of large-scale CMB anisotropies in a Starobinsky inflation model, especially with a pre-inflation stage, improving data fit.

Contribution

It demonstrates that introducing a pre-inflation stage in a Hartle-Hawking Starobinsky model can suppress large-scale CMB power, aligning better with observations.

Findings

Suppression of large-scale CMB power with pre-inflation stage

Better fit to Planck CMB data

Universe may have originated from a compact Hartle-Hawking state

Abstract

The lack of correlations on the large scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy provides a potential window to probe beyond the standard inflationary scenario. In this paper, we investigate the primordial power spectrum based on the Hartle-Hawking (HH) no-boundary proposal for a homogeneous, isotropic, and spatially-closed universe that leads to a Starobinsky-type inflation after the classicalization. While we found that there is no suppression at large scales in the standard R + R^2 theory, we also found that it is possible to sufficiently suppress the large-scale power spectrum if a pre-inflation stage is introduced to the Starobinsky-type model. We calculate the C^TT_l correlation function and show that our proposal gives a better fit to the Planck CMB data. l This suggests that our universe might have begun with a compact HH state with a small positive curvature.