Related papers: (Higgs) vacuum decay during inflation
We present an effective model where the inflaton is a relaxion that scans the Higgs mass and sets it at the weak scale. The dynamics consist of a long epoch in which inflation is due to the shallow slope of the potential, followed by a few…
The accelerated expansion of the early universe is an integral part of modern cosmology and dynamically realized by the mechanism of inflation. The simplest theoretical description of the inflationary paradigm is based on the assumption of…
The quantisation of scalar field theory and Einstein gravity is investigated using a fully covariant background field formalism, including Vilkovisky-DeWitt corrections. The one-loop divergences, which are relevant for the consistency of…
We present detailed calculations for quantum-gravitational corrections to the power spectra of gauge-invariant scalar and tensor perturbations during inflation. This is done by performing a semiclassical Born-Oppenheimer type of…
We propose a class of scalar models that, once coupled to gravity, lead to cosmologies that smoothly and stably connect an inflationary quasi-de Sitter universe to a low, or even zero-curvature, maximally symmetric spacetime in the…
The abundance of the QCD axion is known to be suppressed if the Hubble parameter during inflation, $H_{\rm inf}$, is lower than the QCD scale, and if the inflation lasts sufficiently long. We show that the tight upper bound on the inflation…
At the level of heuristic effective dynamics, we investigate the cosmological inflation with holonomy corrections of loop quantum cosmology (LQC) in the $k=0$ Friedmann-Robertson-Walker model with a single inflaton field subject to a simple…
We investigate the inflation and reheating phenomenology in scalar-Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory of gravity where a scalar field non-minimally couples with the Gauss-Bonnet (GB) curvature term. Regarding the inflationary phenomenology, we…
The measured values of the Higgs and top quark mass indicate that the electroweak vacuum is metastable if there is no new physics below the Planck scale. This is at odds with a period of high scale inflation. A non-minimal coupling between…
We critically examine the recent claim that the Standard Model Higgs boson ${\cal H}$ could drive inflation in agreement with observations if $|{\cal H}|^2$ has a strong coupling $\xi\sim 10^4$ to the Ricci curvature scalar. We first show…
We investigate the possibility of using the only known fundamental scalar, the Higgs, as an inflaton with minimal coupling to gravity. The peculiar appearance of a plateau or a false vacuum in the renormalised effective scalar potential…
We investigate the inflaton decay and reheating period after the end of inflation in the non-minimal derivative coupling (NDC) model with chaotic potential. In general, this model is known to provide an enhanced slow-roll inflation caused…
Within the Standard Model, the current Higgs and top quark data favor metastability of the electroweak vacuum, although the uncertainties are still significant. The true vacuum is many orders of magnitude deeper than ours and the barrier…
We study the decay of scalar fields, in particular the inflaton, into lighter scalars in a De Sitter spacetime background. After providing a practical definition of the rate, we focus on the case of an inflaton interacting with a massless…
Higgs inflation can occur if the Standard Model (SM) is a self-consistent effective field theory up to inflationary scale. This leads to a lower bound on the Higgs boson mass, $M_h \geq M_{\text{crit}}$. If $M_h$ is more than a few hundreds…
We study the resonant decay of the Higgs condensate into weak gauge bosons after inflation and estimate the corrections arising from the non-Abelian self-interactions of the gauge fields. We find that non-Abelian interaction terms induce an…
In the era of precision cosmology, different observational data has led to precise measurements of the Hubble constant that differ significantly, what has been called the Hubble tension problem. In order to solve such a discrepancy, many…
We derive a Higgs inflationary model in the context of a complex geometrical scalar-tensor theory of gravity. In this model the Higgs inflaton scalar field has geometrical origin playing the role of the Weyl scalar field in the original…
The detection of an oscillating pattern in the bispectrum of density perturbations could suggest the existence of a high-energy second minimum in the Higgs potential. If the Higgs field resided in this new minimum during inflation and was…
Cosmological implications of Higgs field fluctuations during inflation are considered. This study is based on the Standard Model and the standard quadratic model of chaotic inflation where the Higgs field is minimally coupled to gravity and…