Constraints on Natural Inflation from Cosmic Microwave Background

Abstract

We study constraints on the natural inflation model from the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). Inflaton \phi for the natural inflation has a potential of the form V=\Lambda^4[1-\cos(\phi/\sqrt{2}f_\phi)], which is parametrized by two parameters f_\phi and \Lambda. Various cosmological quantities, like the primordial curvature perturbation and the CMBR anisotropy, are determined as functions of these two parameters. Using recent observations of the CMBR anisotropy by BOOMERANG and MAXIMA (as well as those from COBE), constraints on the parameters f_\phi and \Lambda are derived. The model with f_\phi lower than 8.5\times 10^{18} (5.4\times 10^{18}, 4.5\times 10^{18}) GeV predicts a power spectrum with index n_{\rm S} smaller than 0.95 (0.9, 0.85) which suppresses the CMBR anisotropy for smaller angular scale. With such a small n_{\rm S}, height of the second acoustic peak can become significantly lower than the case of the scale-invariant Harrison-Zeldovich spectrum.