Resurrecting Quadratic Inflation with a non-minimal coupling to gravity

Published 1 December 2017 © 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab
, , Citation Tommi Tenkanen JCAP12(2017)001 DOI 10.1088/1475-7516/2017/12/001

1475-7516/2017/12/001

Abstract

We study Quadratic Inflation with the inflaton field ϕ coupled non-minimally to the curvature scalar R, so that the potential during inflation is of the form V∝ m2+ξ Rϕ2. We show that with a suitable choice of the non-minimal coupling strength, ξ=Script O(10−3), one can resurrect the success of the scenario when compared against the Planck and BICEP2/Keck Array data, and that in the region of the parameter space which is still allowed the model predicts values of the tensor-to-scalar ratio in the range 0.01⩽ r < 0.12, making it possible to either confirm the scenario or rule it out already by the current or near-future experiments, such as BICEP3 or LiteBIRD. However, we show that in this case the near-future observations are unlikely to be able to distinguish between the metric and Palatini formulations of gravity.

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10.1088/1475-7516/2017/12/001