Natural Inflation with a periodic non-minimal coupling

Abstract

Natural inflation is an attractive model for primordial inflation, since the potential for the inflaton is of the pseudo Nambu-Goldstone form, $V(\phi)=\Lambda^4 [1+\cos (\phi/f)]$, and so is protected against radiative corrections. Successful inflation can be achieved if $f \gtrsim {\rm few}\, M_{P}$ and $\Lambda \sim m_{GUT}$ where $\Lambda$ can be seen as the strong coupling scale of a given non-abelian gauge group. However, the latest observational constraints put natural inflation in some tension with data. We show here that a non-minimal coupling to gravity $\gamma^2(\phi) R$, that respects the symmetry $\phi\rightarrow \phi+2 \pi f$ and has a simple form, proportional to the potential, can improve the agreement with cosmological data. Moreover, in certain cases, satisfactory agreement with the Planck 2018 TT, TE, EE and low P data can be achieved even for a periodicity scale of approximately $M_p$.