2016/04/30 by Benedict J. Broy, Dries Coone, Diederik Roest · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmic background radiation #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Coupling (piping) #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Inflation (cosmology) #Inflaton #Non-Gaussianity #Normalization (sociology) #Observable #Scalar field #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2016/06/036
published as JCAP06 (2016) 036 · 9 pages, twocolumn, some figures; v2: 1 figure and appendix added, jcap layout
openalex publication_date 2016/06/20 · arxiv created 2016/06/21 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · arxiv updated 2016/10/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
A generic non-minimal coupling can push any higher-order terms of the scalar potential sufficiently far out in field space to yield observationally viable plateau inflation. We provide analytic and numerical evidence that this generically happens for a non-minimal coupling strength ξ of the order N 2 e . In this regime, the non-minimally coupled field is sub-Planckian during inflation and is thus protected from most higher-order terms. For larger values of ξ, the inflationary predictions converge towards the sweet spot of PLANCK. The latter includes ξ ≃ 10 4 obtained from CMB normalization arguments, thus providing a natural explanation for the inflationary observables measured.