Constraints on polynomial inflation under power-law perturbations

TL;DR

This paper examines how adding a second term to power-law inflationary potentials affects key cosmological parameters, providing constraints based on Planck data and exploring the method's potential for more complex models.

Contribution

It introduces a perturbative approach to analyze modifications in polynomial inflation models and assesses their compatibility with observational data.

Findings

Constraints on the free parameter of the inflationary potential.

Perturbative method's potential to identify features matching cosmological data.

Insights into the fundamental physics implications of inflationary modifications.

Abstract

We investigate perturbations in power-law monomial potentials within inflationary models driven by a single scalar field. By introducing a second term to the original potential, we study how this perturbation influences the slow-roll parameters and analyze the consequent changes in the spectral index, $n_s$, and the tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r$, treating the additional term as a correction to the monomial case. Comparing our numerical results with current cosmological data from the Planck satellite observations on $n_s$, $r$, and the clustering parameter, $\sigma_8$, we place significant constraints on the free parameter of our class of inflationary potentials. We found that the perturbative consistency method we analyze could be an interesting test to explore for more complex inflationary models, looking for features that better match the data that might highlight fundamental physics implications.