Resurrecting Quadratic Inflation with a non-minimal coupling to gravity

Abstract

We study Quadratic Inflation with the inflaton field $\varphi$ coupled non-minimally to the curvature scalar $R$, so that the potential during inflation is of the form $V\propto m^2{\varphi }^2+\xi R{\varphi }^2$. 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 $0.01\le r<0.12$, 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.

Comments: 11 pages, 5 figures. v2: An error in the numerical code fixed, figures updated accordingly, main results unaltered. Some discussion, a figure, and references added