Constraints on non-canonical chaotic inflation from ACT DR6 and BICEP/Keck data

Wei Yang; Chen-Hao Wu; Ya-Peng Hu

doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2026.140532

paper

Constraints on non-canonical chaotic inflation from ACT DR6 and BICEP/Keck data

arXiv:2605.16772 · doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2026.140532

Abstract

In this study, we precisely evaluated the feasibility of the chaotic inflation model within a non-canonical kinetic framework. By applying the slow-roll approximation and imposing constraints on the equilateral non-Gaussianity $f_{NL}^{equil}$ , we imposed constraints on the feasible range of the potential index $n$ . We established physical bounds for the non-canonical parameter $α$ . To obtain precise parameter constraints, we solved the primordial perturbation equations numerically and conducted a rigorous MCMC analysis by using a comprehensive joint P-ACT-LB-BK18 dataset. For these potentials $n = 1/3$ , $2/3$ , and $1$ , our results respectively tightly limit $α$ to the levels of $8. 8_{- 2.8}^{+ 1.6}$ , $11. 7_{- 2.6}^{+ 1.7}$ , and $16. 4_{- 7.0}^{+ 3.7}$ , within the corresponding $1 σ$ confidence intervals. Meanwhile, the required number of $e$ -foldings naturally converges to $N ≃ 54$ , without the need for fine-tuning. These findings confirm that non-standard mechanisms can resurrect excluded chaotic inflation models within the $1 σ$ allowed regions of high-precision cosmological data.

10 pages, 7 figures

Constraints on non-canonical chaotic inflation from ACT DR6 and BICEP/Keck data

Abstract

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