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 1σ 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.