Non-minimal two-loop inflation

Abstract

© 2015 The Authors. We investigate the chaotic inflationary model using the two-loop effective potential of a self-interacting scalar field theory in curved spacetime. We use the potential which contains a non-minimal scalar curvature coupling and a quartic scalar self-interaction and which was found in Ref. [1]. We analyze the Lyapunov stability of de Sitter solution and show the stability bound. Calculating the inflationary parameters, we systematically explore the spectral index n<inf>s</inf> and the tensor-to-scalar ratio r, with varying the four parameters, the scalar-curvature coupling ξ<inf>0</inf>, the scalar quartic coupling λ<inf>0</inf>, the renormalization scale μ and the e-folding number N. It is found that the two-loop correction on n<inf>s</inf> is much larger than the leading-log correction, which has previously been studied in Ref. [2]. We show that the model is consistent with the observation by Planck with WMAP [3,4] and a recent joint analysis of BICEP2 [5].