Classical and quantum initial conditions for Higgs inflation

By A. Salvio, Anupam Mazumdar. 2015

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We investigate whether Higgs inflation can occur in the Standard Model starting from natural initial conditions or not. The Higgs has a non-minimal coupling to the Ricci scalar. We confine our attention to the regime where quantum Einstein gravity effects are small in order to have results that are independent of the ultraviolet completion of gravity. At the classical level we find no tuning is required to have successful Higgs inflation, provided the initial homogeneity condition is satisfied. On the other hand, at the quantum level we obtain that the renormalization for large non-minimal coupling requires an additional degree of freedom, unless a tuning of the initial values of the running parameters is made. In order to see that this effect may change the predictions we finally include such degree of freedom in the field content and show that Starobinsky's R 2 inflation dominates over Higgs inflation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/394ba55ff94d48e94bf3857c9d3b1166415b5191

Citations in the corpus

• Violent preheating in inflation with nonminimal coupling (2016, unknown): “(3)It has been pointed out that in Higgs inflation ξ ≫ 1 generically generates large R(2) term in the action without some fine-tuning [11].”