CMB hemispherical power asymmetry from early phase of inflation

Abstract We investigate the hemispherical power asymmetry observed in the CMBR by attributing it to an early inhomogeneous phase of cosmic expansion. Unlike the conventional assumption of a perfectly isotropic and homogeneous pre-inflationary Universe, we introduce a small inhomogeneous perturbation, treated within a perturbative framework. Our analysis builds on previously developed empirical models of inhomogeneous primordial power spectrum models based on dipole modulation. Using in-in formalism, we compute two-point correlations directly from the metric and demonstrate that, at leading order, this introduces a direction-dependent power spectrum that breaks rotational symmetry and naturally selects a preferred direction, relating observed violation of the cosmological principle to inflationary power spectra arising from scalar field fluctuations. Additionally, we find that this framework produces correlations between multipoles separated by Δ l = 1, leading to distinctive signatures in the multipole space. Furthermore, we constrain the parameters of the inhomogeneous perturbation using observed PR4 Commander CMB data.