Natural inflation from fermion loops

Natural inflationary theories are a class of models in which inflation is driven by a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson. In this paper we consider two models, one old and one new, in which the potential for inflation is generated by loop effects from a fermion sector which explicitly breaks a global U(1) symmetry. In both models we retrieve the standard natural inflation potential V(Ø)4[1+cos(Ø/μ)] as a limiting case of the exact one-loop potential, but we carry out a general analysis of the models including the limiting case. Constraints from the COBE DMR observation and from theoretical consistency are used to limit the parameters of the models, and successful inflation occurs without the necessity of fine-tuning the parameters.