Abstract
Natural inflation is a well-motivated model for the early universe in which an inflaton potential of the pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone form, V(ϕ) = Λ4[1 + cos(ϕ/f)], can naturally drive a cosmic accelerated epoch. This paper investigates the observational viability of the minimally and non-minimally coupled natural inflation scenarios in light of current Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations. We find that a small and negative coupling of the field with gravity can alleviate the well-known observational discrepancies of the minimally coupled model. We perform a Monte Carlo Markov Chain analysis of the Planck 2018 CMB and BICEP/Keck Array B-mode polarization data to estimate how strong the coupling ξ should be to achieve concordance with data. We also briefly discuss the impact of these results on the physical interpretation of the natural inflation scenario.
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