Notes on natural inflation

In the so-called natural inflation, an axion-like inflaton is assumed to have a cosine-type periodic potential. This is not the case in a very simple model in which the axion-like inflaton is coupled to an SU(N) (or other) pure Yang-Mills, at least in the large N limit as pointed out by Witten. It has a multi-valued potential, which is effectively quadratic, i.e., there is only a mass term in the large N limit. Thanks to this property, chaotic inflation can be realized more naturally with the decay constant of the axion-like inflaton less than the Planck scale. We demonstrate these points explicitly by using softly broken =1 Super-Yang-Mills which allows us to treat finite N. This analysis also suggests that moderately large gauge groups such as E₈ are good enough with a Planck scale decay constant.