Potential-driven Inflation with Disformal Coupling to Gravity

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the potential-driven inflation models with a disformal coupling to Einstein Gravity, to find out the effects of such a coupling on these models. We consider a simple coupling form which introduces only one parameter, and three inflation models, namely the chaotic inflation, the Higgs inflation, and the monodromy inflation. We find that the disformal coupling can have some modifications to the observational variables of these models such as the power spectrum, the spectral index as well as the tensor/scalar ratio, although not too large due to the constraints on the disformal coupling parameter. With these modifications, one has the opportunity of improving models that lie on the edge of the favorable regions of Planck observational data, such as monodromy inflation. Moreover, the non-trivial sound speed of tensor perturbations (gravitational waves) may come out, due to the coupling of gravity and kinetic terms of the field.