Phenomenological investigation of a quantum gravity extension of inflation with the Starobinsky potential

Understand

We investigate the pre-inflationary dynamics of inflation with the Starobinsky potential, favored by recent data from the Planck mission, using techniques developed to study cosmological perturbations on quantum spacetimes in the framework of loop quantum cosmology.

• We find that for a large part of the initial data, inflation compatible with observations occurs.
• There exists a subset of this initial data that leads to quantum gravity signatures that are potentially observable.
• Interestingly, despite the different inflationary dynamics, these quantum gravity corrections to the powerspectra are similar to those obtained for inflation with a quadratic potential, including suppression of power at large scales.