English

Radiative-Corrected Higgs Inflation in Light of the Latest ACT Observations

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2025-11-18 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

Recent measurements from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), particularly when combined with DESI baryon acoustic oscillation data, have reported a scalar spectral index nsn_s slightly higher than that inferred by {\it Planck}~2018, suggesting a mild tension with the predictions of standard inflationary attractor models. In this work, we revisit the quantum-corrected Higgs inflation scenario within the framework of a non-minimally coupled scalar field theory. Starting from the one-loop effective action, we incorporate radiative corrections through the anomalous scaling parameter AI{\bf A_I} and derive analytic expressions for the inflationary observables nsn_s and rr in the Einstein frame. Our analysis demonstrates that quantum corrections naturally shift nsn_s toward higher values while keeping the tensor-to-scalar ratio rr suppressed. For N=60{\cal N} = 60, the model predicts ns0.9743n_s \simeq 0.9743 and r5.4×103r \simeq 5.4\times10^{-3}, in excellent agreement with the latest ACT+DESI (P-ACT-LB) data and fully consistent with the \textit{Planck}~2018 limit r<0.036r < 0.036. The derived constraint 4.36×1010<λ/ξ2<10.77×10104.36\times10^{-10} < \lambda/\xi^{2} < 10.77\times10^{-10} confirms the robustness of the quantum-corrected Higgs framework and indicates that near-future CMB polarization experiments such as CORE, AliCPT, LiteBIRD, and CMB-S4 will be able to probe the predicted parameter space with high precision.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.05770,
  title  = {Radiative-Corrected Higgs Inflation in Light of the Latest ACT Observations},
  author = {Jureeporn Yuennan and Farruh Atamurotov and Phongpichit Channuie},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.05770},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

v2: version accepted for publication in Physics Letters B, more references added, 9 pages, 1 figure