Non-minimally assisted chaotic inflation

Abstract

Conventional wisdom says that a chaotic inflation model with a power-law potential is ruled out by the recent Planck-BICEP/Keck results. We find, however, that the model can be assisted by a non-minimally coupled scalar field and still provides a successful inflation. Considering a power-law chaotic inflation model of the type V ∼φn with n = {2, 4/3, 1, 2/3, 1/3}, we show that n = 1/3 (n = {2/3, 1/3}) may be revived with the help of the quadratic (quartic) non-minimal coupling of the assistant field to gravity.