Chaotic inflation, radiative corrections and precision cosmology

Abstract: We employ chaotic ( and ) inflation to illustrate the important role radiative corrections can play during the inflationary phase. Yukawa interactions of ϕ, in particular, lead to corrections of the form , where and μ is a renormalization scale. For instance, chaotic inflation with radiative corrections looks compatible with the most recent WMAP (5 year) analysis, in sharp contrast to the tree level case. We obtain the 95% confidence limits , and , where and r respectively denote the scalar spectral index and scalar to tensor ratio. The limits for inflation are , and . The next round of precision experiments should provide a more stringent test of realistic chaotic and inflation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]