Natural Chaotic Inflation and UV Sensitivity

If the recent measurement of B-mode polarization by BICEP2 is due to primordial gravitational waves, it implies that inflation was driven by energy densities at the GUT scale $M_{GUT} \sim 2\times 10^{16} GeV$. This favors single-field chaotic inflation models. These models require transplanckian excursions of the inflaton, forcing one to address the UV completion of the theory. We use a benchmark 4d effective field theory of axion-4-form inflation to argue that inflation driven by a quadratic potential (with small corrections) is well motivated in the context of high-scale string theory models; that it presents an interesting incitement for string model building; and the dynamics of the UV completion can have observable consequences.

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