Observational constraints on α-attractor inflationary models with a Higgs-like potential

Abstract

We investigate the observational viability of a class of α-attractors inflationary models in light of the most recent Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and Large-Scale Structure (LSS) data. By considering a double-well potential we perform a slow-roll analysis to study the behavior of this class of models, which is a continuous interpolation between the chaotic inflation for large values of α and the universal attractor, i.e., ns=1−2/N and r=α12/N2 for small α, where ns is the scalar spectral index, r is the tensor-to-scalar ratio, and N is the e-fold number. In order to explore the parameter space of the model, we also perform a MCMC analysis and find α=7.56±5.15 (1σ).

Keywords

• Inflation
• Cosmological parameters from CMB
• MCMC analysis