Higgs inflation: consistency and generalisations

By Fedor Bezrukov, A. Magnin, M. Shaposhnikov, S. Sibiryakov. 2010

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We analyse the self-consistency of inflation in the Standard Model, where the Higgs field has a large non-minimal coupling to gravity. We determine the domain of energies in which this model represents a valid effective field theory as a function of the background Higgs field. This domain is bounded above by the cutoff scale which is found to be higher than the relevant dynamical scales throughout the whole history of the Universe, including the inflationary epoch and reheating. We present a systematic scheme to take into account quantum loop corrections to the inflationary calculations within the framework of effective field theory. We discuss the additional assumptions that must be satisfied by the ultra-violet completion of the theory to allow connection between the parameters of the inflationary effective theory and those describing the low-energy physics relevant for the collider experiments. A class of generalisations of inflationary theories with similar properties is constructed.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6ca94579c06f143e105b0951eb3335902da55649

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Citations in the corpus

Inflationary Cosmology after Planck 2013 (2014, background): “An investigation performed in [117, 124] demonstrated that the”
Higgs inflation with loop corrections in the Palatini formulation (2017, background): “5 However, it has been countered that the cutoff scale should depend on the Higgs field [33, 49], and when this is taken into account, the theory is during inflation perturbatively valid at the scale relevant for inflation.”
Higgs inflation at the critical point (2014, background): “Another assumption is about the absence of operators suppressed by the Planck scale (or various tree level unitarity violation scales [35]), which may be justified by a special scale (or shift in the Einstein frame) symmetry of the UV complete theory.”
Superconformal symmetry, NMSSM, and inflation (2010, background): “[35] mentioned a possibility of the unitarity cutoff Λ ∼ 1/ √ ξ, but for ξ ∼ 104 this cutoff is 2 orders of magnitude higher than the Hubble constant during inflation, so it is harmless.”
Higgs boson mass and new physics (2012, methodology): “For the lower part of the admitted interval the value of the nonminimal coupling ξ reaches its minimal value ξ ' 700, extending the region of applicability of perturbation theory [12, 54, 55].”
Dynamically induced Planck scale and inflation (2015, background): “Furthermore, dynamical generation of masses is compatible with the small observed cosmological constant provided that the scalar potential satisfies the ‘multiple point criticality principle’ [66], that was introduced for the SM Higgs boson and is extensively used in Higgs inflation [67, 68].”
Observational consequences of chaotic inflation with nonminimal coupling to gravity (2011, methodology): “statement, one may compare the potential λ4 (φ 2 − v2)2 with ξ < 0 in the limit |ξ|v2 → 1 with the potential in the Higgs inflation model [9] with ξ > 0 and v < 1, for the same values of parameters λ and |ξ|, see Figs.”
Standard Model—axion—seesaw—Higgs portal inflation. Five problems of particle physics and cosmology solved in one stroke (2016, methodology): “An explicit expression for the unitarity breaking scale as a function of the non-minimal coupling ξσ is given by [19,128]:”
Higgs inflation from Standard Model criticality (2014, background): “In the original version of the Higgs inflation [32, 40, 41], it is assumed that ξ := a2 happens to be large: ξ ∼ 104, whereas the other couplings are not much larger than unity: ξ a2, a4, .”