Multi-natural inflation

We propose a multi-natural inflation model in which the single-field inflaton potential consists of two or more sinusoidal potentials that are comparable in size but have different periodicity with a possible non-zero relative phase. The model is versatile enough to realize both large-field and small-field inflation. We show that, in a model with two sinusoidal potentials, the predicted values of the spectral index and tensor-to-scalar ratio lie within the 1 sigma region of the Planck data. In particular, there is no lower bound on the decay constants in contrast to the original natural inflation. We also show that, in a certain limit, multi-natural inflation can be approximated by a hilltop quartic inflation model. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.