Inflation coupled to a Gauss-Bonnet term

The newly released Planck cosmic microwave background data place tight constraints on slow-roll inflationary models. Some commonly discussed inflationary potentials are disfavored due mainly to the large tensor-to-scalar ratio. In this paper we show that these potentials may be in good agreement with the Planck data when the inflaton has a nonminimal coupling to the Gauss-Bonnet term. Moreover, such a coupling violates the consistency relation between the tensor spectral index and tensor-to-scalar ratio. If the tensor spectral index is allowed to vary freely, the Planck constraints on the tensor-to-scalar ratio are slightly improved.