English

Natural Inflation After Planck 2018

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2022-01-26 v2 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We calculate high-precision constraints on Natural Inflation relative to current observational constraints from Planck 2018 + BICEP/Keck(BK15) Polarization + BAO on rr and nSn_S, including post-inflationary history of the universe. We find that, for conventional post-inflationary dynamics, Natural Inflation with a cosine potential is disfavored at greater than 95\% confidence out by current data. If we assume protracted reheating characterized by w>1/3,\overline{w}>1/3, Natural Inflation can be brought into agreement with current observational constraints. However, bringing unmodified Natural Inflation into the 68\% confidence region requires values of TreT_{\mathrm{re}} below the scale of electroweak symmetry breaking. The addition of a SHOES prior on the Hubble Constant H0H_0 only worsens the fit.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2106.02089,
  title  = {Natural Inflation After Planck 2018},
  author = {Nina K. Stein and William H. Kinney},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.02089},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

13 pages, 4 figures (v2: References added)

R2 v1 2026-06-24T02:48:45.406Z