On the Naturalness of Higgs Inflation

By J. Barbón, J. Espinosa. 2009

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We critically examine the recent claim that the standard model (SM) Higgs boson H could drive inflation in agreement with observations if |H|{sup 2} has a strong coupling {xi}{approx}10{sup 4} to the Ricci curvature scalar. We first show that the effective-theory approach upon which that claim is based ceases to be valid beyond a cutoff scale {lambda}=m{sub p}/{xi}, where m{sub p} is the reduced Planck mass. We then argue that knowing the Higgs potential profile for the field values relevant for inflation (|H|>m{sub p}/{radical}({xi})>>{lambda}) requires knowledge of the ultraviolet completion of the SM beyond {lambda}. In absence of such microscopic theory, the extrapolation of the pure SM potential beyond {lambda} is unwarranted and the scenario is akin to other ad hoc inflaton potentials afflicted with significant fine-tuning. The appealing naturalness of this minimal proposal is therefore lost.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6cc8ffd04ec45b283fe5e6d59bb71ae5a7b0e175

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Citations in the corpus

Higgs Inflation (2018, methodology): “Although a precise measurement of the inflationary observables could be understood as an interesting consistency check between cosmological observations and particle physics experiments [18, 52, 70–76], the low- to high-energy connection is subject to unavoidable ambiguities related to the non-renor”
Higgs boson mass and new physics (2012, background): “One must note, that simple scale analysis leads to the unitarity violation in the Higgs inflation below the Planck energy scale [56–59].”
Higgs mass and vacuum stability in the Standard Model at NNLO (2012, background): “It is naturally expected that these phenomena will affect the scalar potential above MPl/ξ in an uncontrollable way [51, 52].”
Higgs inflation: consistency and generalisations (2010, background): “This coincides with the zero background result of [17, 18, 19].”
The landscape of QCD axion models (2020, methodology): “Having the inflaton direction as a mixture of the radial modes of H and Φ provides a solution of the unitarity problem of standard Higgs inflation [662, 663].”
On inflation with non-minimal coupling (2010, background): “Various attempts have been made at addressing whether quantum corrections spoil the validity of these non-minimal models of inflation due to the ξφ2R term; see [6, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28].”
Inflationary Cosmology after Planck 2013 (2014, background): “Since the Hubble constant during inflation is O( √ λ/ξ), and λ = O(1) in Higgs inflation, it was conjectured in [120, 121, 122, 123] that the description of the Higgs inflation using perturbation theory is unreliable.”
The cosmological Higgstory of the vacuum instability (2015, background): “However, for nonzero ξH , the ultraviolet cutoff of the SM is no longer M̄Pl, but M̄Pl/|ξH | [57, 58].”
Higgs inflation at the critical point (2014, background): “The large value of ξ , necessary for the Higgs inflation far from the critical point, effectively introduces a new strong-coupling threshold Λ ∼ M P /ξ well below the Planck scale, if the scattering of the SM particles is considered around the EW vacuum [33,34].”