Low-$\ell$ power suppression in punctuated inflation
  Motivated by Planck confirmation of an anomalously low value of the CMB
temperature fluctuations up to multipole $\ell<40$, 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 fit 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 find that punctuated inflation leads to better fit in
CMB data compared to simple power law model. The improvement in the fit to the
WMAP9 data is $\Delta \chi^2\sim 3.6$ and for Planck the improvement is $\Delta
\chi^2\sim 5.4$. We find that $AIC$ does not discriminate between punctuated
inflation and simple power law model for WMAP9 data. However, for Planck data
we find that punctuated inflation is moderately preferred over a simple power
law model.
