Light inflaton hunter’s guide

By Fedor Bezrukov, D. Gorbunov. 2009

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We study the phenomenology of a realistic version of the chaotic inflationary model, which can be fully and directly explored in particle physics experiments. The inflaton mixes with the Standard Model Higgs boson via the scalar potential, and no additional scales above the electroweak scale are present in the model. The inflaton-to-Higgs coupling is responsible for both reheating in the Early Universe and the inflaton production in particle collisions. We find the allowed range of the light inflaton mass, 270 MeV ≲ mχ ≲ 1.8 GeV, and discuss the ways to find the inflaton. The most promising are two-body kaon and B-meson decays with branching ratios of orders 10−9 and 10−6, respectively. The inflaton is unstable with the lifetime 10−9–10−10 s. The inflaton decays can be searched for in a beam-target experiment, where, depending on the inflaton mass, from several billions to several tenths of millions inflatons can be produced per year with modern high-intensity beams.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3360dd161bde705da52c69e185722c359615cf16

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Citations in the corpus

FASER’s physics reach for long-lived particles (2018, methodology): “This can be achieved by assuming large vS, while the dark Higgs boson can be made light with mφ mh by suppressing the coupling μS and tuning the quartic couplings to be , λS 1 [62].”
A facility to search for hidden particles at the CERN SPS: the SHiP physics case (2015, methodology): “S +Xs) [221, 230] and similarly for the kaons.”
Physics beyond colliders at CERN: beyond the Standard Model working group report (2019, background): “An important property of the scalar portal is that at loop level it can induce flavour-changing transitions, and in particular lead to decays K → πS, B → K(∗)S etc [28, 30, 31] and similarly for the hS2 coupling [32].”
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A White Paper on keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2016, background): “In particular, the “parent” S-particle can itself be in or out of thermal equilibrium at the time the sterile neutrinos are produced and, depending on the model, the decay into the sterile neutrinos may be the only possible decay channel [730] or one of many possible decay channels into light partic”
Rare $B$ Decays as Tests of the Standard Model (2016, background): “One class of models involves the scalar portal hypothesises that such a field was responsible for an inflationary period in the early universe [289], and may have generated the baryon asymmetry observed today [290, 291].”
Expression of interest for the CODEX-b detector (2019, background): “(See [43] for similar phenomenology in a model where the light scalar is identified with the inflaton.”
The Beam and detector of the NA62 experiment at CERN (2017, background): “These searches can be interpreted in terms of phase-space limitations for the dark photon [78, 79], axion [80], inflaton [81, 82] and heavy neutral leptons [83] .”
ALPtraum: ALP production in proton beam dump experiments (2015, methodology): “The two most constraining experiments are9 CHARM [12], which has recently been used to derive constraints on light scalars and pseudoscalars with couplings to quarks [33, 34], and NuCal [5], which has been reanalysed for the case of hidden photons [23, 24].”
Dark Matter, Baryogenesis and Neutrino Oscillations from Right Handed Neutrinos (2012, background): “(4)Inflation can be realized without modification of the gravitational interaction by adding an extra scalar to the νMSM [38] (see also [15, 39, 40]).”
New production mechanism for keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter by decays of frozen-in scalars (2013, background): “For example, for keV sterile neutrinos, this production mechanism exists for the scalar being an inflaton [58, 59] or a more general scalar singlet in equilibrium with the thermal plasma [60, 61].”