Natural chaotic inflation and ultraviolet sensitivity

If the recent measurement of B-mode polarization by BICEP2 is due to primordial gravitational waves, it implies that inflation was driven by energy densities at the grand unified theory scale M-GUT similar to 2 x 10(16) GeV. This favors single-field chaotic inflation models. These models require trans-Planckian excursions of the inflaton, forcing one to address the UV completion of the theory. We use a benchmark 4d effective field theory of axion-four-form inflation to argue that inflation driven by a quadratic potential (with small corrections) is well motivated in the context of high-scale string theory models; that it presents an interesting incitement for string model building; and that the dynamics of the UV completion can have observable consequences.