Notes on natural inflation
  In the so-called natural inflation, an axion-like inflaton is assumed to have
a cosine-type periodic potential. This is not the case in a very simple model
in which the axion-like inflaton is coupled to an SU(N) (or other) pure
Yang-Mills, at least in the large N limit as pointed out by Witten. It has a
multi-valued potential, which is effectively quadratic, i.e., there is only a
mass term in the large N limit. Thanks to this property, chaotic inflation can
be realized more naturally with the decay constant of the axion-like inflaton
less than the Planck scale. We demonstrate these points explicitly by using
softly broken ${\mathcal N}=1$ Super-Yang-Mills which allows us to treat finite
N. This analysis also suggests that moderately large gauge groups such as
$E_{8}$ are good enough with a Planck scale decay constant.
