Constraints on small-field axion inflation

Abstract

We study general class of small-field axion inflations which are the mixture of polynomial and sinusoidal functions suggested by the natural and axion monodromy inflations. The axion decay constants leading to the successful axion inflations are severely constrained in order not to spoil the Big-Bang nucleosynthesis and overproduce the isocurvature perturbation originating from the QCD axion. We in turn find that the cosmologically favorable axion decay constants are typically of order the grand unification scale or the string scale which is consistent with the prediction of closed string axions.