Likelihood analysis of small field polynomial models of inflation yielding a high Tensor-to-Scalar ratio

Abstract

Inflationary potentials, with Planckian field excursions, described by a 6th degree polynomial are studied. We solve the Mukhanov-Sasaki equations exactly and employ a probabilistic approach as well as multinomial fitting to analyse the results. We identify the most likely models which yield a tensor-to-scalar ratio r = 0.01 in addition to currently allowed Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) spectrum and observables. Additionally, we find a significant inter-dependence of CMB observables in these models. This might be an important effect for future analyses, since the different moments of the primordial power spectrum are taken to be independent in the usual Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.