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arXiv · 1710.02758

Resurrecting Quadratic Inflation with a non-minimal coupling to gravity

Tommi Tenkanen
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Abstract

We study Quadratic Inflation with the inflaton field $\phi$ coupled non-minimally to the curvature scalar $R$, so that the potential during inflation is of the form $V\propto m^2\phi^2+\xi R\phi^2$. We show that with a suitable choice of the non-minimal coupling strength, $\xi=\mathcal{O}(10^{-3})$, 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 $0.01\leq r < 0.12$, 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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Tommi Tenkanen. 2017-10-07. Resurrecting Quadratic Inflation with a non-minimal coupling to gravity. https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516%2F2017%2F12%2F001

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