Natural Inflation After Planck 2018
Abstract
We calculate high-precision constraints on Natural Inflation relative to current observational constraints from Planck 2018 + BICEP/Keck(BK15) Polarization + BAO on and , 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 Natural Inflation can be brought into agreement with current observational constraints. However, bringing unmodified Natural Inflation into the 68\% confidence region requires values of below the scale of electroweak symmetry breaking. The addition of a SHOES prior on the Hubble Constant 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)