Inflation with a quartic potential in the framework of Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity

We investigate inflationary dynamics in the framework of the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity. In the model under consideration, the inflaton field is nonminimally coupled to the Gauss-Bonnet curvature invariant, so that the latter appears to be dynamically important. We consider a quartic potential for the inflaton field, in particular, the one asymptotically connected to the Higgs inflation, and a wider class of coupling functions not considered in the earlier work. Keeping in mind the observational bounds on the parameters---the amplitude of scalar perturbations Aₒ, spectral index nₒ and tensor-to-scalar ratio r, we demonstrate that the model a quartic potential and the proposed coupling function is in agreement with observations.