Natural Metric-Affine Inflation: Reloaded

We revisit natural inflation within the framework of metric-affine gravity, considering the impact of a periodic non-minimal coupling between the inflaton and the Nieh-Yan term. Such a term, alone, leads to linear inflation predictions in the strong coupling limit and cannot help to rescue the natural inflation scenario. However, once an analogous non-minimal coupling with the Ricci scalar is added, agreement with data can be easily achieved. Remarkably, the scenario remains viable even with a sub-Planckian periodicity scale and relatively small (order of one) non-minimal couplings.