Related papers: Standard Model Higgs inflation: CMB, Higgs mass an…
We investigate the quantum cosmological tunneling scenario for inflationary models. Within a path-integral approach, we derive the corresponding tunneling probability distribution. A sharp peak in this distribution can be interpreted as the…
The Higgs-Dilaton model is a scale-invariant extension of the Standard Model non-minimally coupled to gravity and containing just one additional degree of freedom on top of the Standard Model particle content. This minimalistic scenario…
Inflation can occur near a point of inflection in the potential of flat directions of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. In this paper we elaborate on the complementarity between the bounds from Cosmic Microwave Background…
Vacuum stability and metastability imply lower limits on the mass of the higgs boson in the Standard Model (SM). In contrast, we present an improved calculation of an upper limit on the lightest higgs mass in supersymmetric (susy) models,…
I am considering Veltman's "The Infrared - Ultraviolet Connection" addressing the issue of quadratic divergences and the related huge radiative correction predicted by the electroweak Standard Model (SM) in the relationship between the bare…
The cosmological relaxation of the electroweak scale has been proposed as a mechanism to address the hierarchy problem of the Standard Model. A field, the relaxion, rolls down its potential and, in doing so, scans the squared mass parameter…
We discuss how much Higgs couplings (including the Higgs self coupling) can deviate from their Standard Model values, in different Beyond Standard Model (BSM) theories, if no other BSM states are accessible at the LHC. Then, we focus on…
We introduce conformal coupling of the Standard Model Higgs field to gravity and discuss the subsequent modification of $R^2$-inflation. The main observation is a lower temperature of reheating which happens mostly through scalaron decays…
During or towards the end of inflation, the Standard Model (SM) Higgs forms a condensate with a large amplitude. Following inflation, the condensate oscillates, decaying non-perturbatively into the rest of the SM species. The resulting…
In the standard inflationary paradigm the inhomogeneities observed in the CMB arise from quantum fluctuations of an initially homogeneous and isotropic vacuum state. This picture suffers from two well-known weaknesses. First, it assumes…
The discovery of the Higgs by ATLAS and CMS at the LHC not only provided the last missing building block of the electroweak Standard Model, the mass of the Higgs has been found to have a very peculiar value about 126 GeV, which is such that…
We propose that inflation is driven by a (complex) neutral Higgs of the MSSM extension of the SM, in a chaotic-like inflation setting. The SUSY breaking soft term masses are of order $10^{12}-10^{13}$ GeV, which is identified with the…
Extrapolating the Standard Model Higgs potential at high energies, we study the barrier between the electroweak and Planck scale minima. The barrier arises by taking the central values of the relevant experimental inputs, that is the strong…
We review the particle theory origin of inflation and curvaton mechanisms for generating large scale structures and the observed temperature anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Since inflaton or curvaton energy…
The ability to test and constrain theories of cosmic inflation will advance substantially over the next decade. Key data sources include cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements and observations of the distribution of matter at…
Scalar field models of inflation based on a large nonminimal coupling to gravity xi, in particular, Higgs inflation, may violate unitarity at an energy scale ~ M_p / xi << M_p. In this case the model is incomplete at energy scales relevant…
The flatness of the inflaton potential and lightness of the Higgs could have the common origin of the breaking of a global symmetry. This scenario provides a unified framework of Goldstone Inflation and Composite Higgs, where the inflaton…
The existence of the Standard Model (SM) Higgs implies that a gravitational wave (GW) background is generated by the decay products of the Higgs, soon after the end of inflation. Theoretically, all Yukawa and $SU(2)_L$ gauge couplings of…
We study the possibility of a heavy scalar or pseudoscalar in TeV-scale beyond the Standard Model scenarios being the inflaton of the early universe in light of the recent O(750) GeV diphoton excess at the LHC. We consider a scenario in…
In this work, we revisit the non-minimally coupled Higgs Inflation scenario and investigate its observational viability in light of the current Cosmic Microwave Background, Baryon Acoustic Oscillation and type Ia Supernovae data. We explore…