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 ∼−1/k2 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/k2 factor, the power on large scales is suppressed. Thus, our model can simultaneously explain the observed anisotropic alignments of the low-ℓ multipoles and their low power.