Can Relic Superhorizon Inhomogeneities be Responsible for Large-Scale
  CMB Anomalies?
  We investigate the effects of the presence of relic classical superhorizon
inhomogeneities during inflation. This superhorizon inhomogeneity appears as a
gradient locally and picks out a preferred direction. Quantum fluctuations on
this slightly inhomogeneous background are generally statistical anisotropic.
We find a quadrupole modification to the ordinary isotropic spectrum. Moreover,
this deviation from statistical isotropy is scale-dependent, with a $\sim
-1/k^2$ factor. This result implies that the statistical anisotropy mainly
appears on large scales, while the spectrum on small scales remains highly
isotropic. Moreover, due to this $-1/k^2$ factor, the power on large scales is
suppressed. Thus, our model can simultaneously explain the observed anisotropic
alignments of the low-$\ell$ multipoles and their low power.
