Related papers: Attracting the Electroweak Scale to a Tachyonic Tr…
Within the framework of tachyon inflation, we consider different steep potentials and check their viability in light of the Planck 2015 data. We see that in this scenario, the inverse power-law potential $V(\phi)=V_{0}(\phi/\phi_{0})^{-n}$…
We show that the Standard Model vacuum can be stabilized if all particle propagators are non-minimally coupled to gravity. This is due to a Higgs-background dependent redefinition of the Standard Model fields: in terms of canonical…
For a robust interpretation of upcoming observations from Planck and LHC experiments it is imperative to understand how the inflationary dynamics of a non-minimally coupled Higgs scalar field may affect the degeneracy of the inflationary…
In many inflationary models, a large amount of energy is transferred rapidly to the long-wavelength matter fields during a period of preheating after inflation. We study how this changes the dynamics of the electroweak phase transition if…
Tachyonic preheating is realized when the inflaton repeatedly returns to a convex region of the potential during the post-inflationary oscillating phase. This will induce a strong tachyonic instability and lead to a rapid fragmentation of…
We consider a possibility that the Higgs field in the Standard Model (SM) serves as an inflaton when its value is around the Planck scale. We assume that the SM is valid up to an ultraviolet cutoff scale \Lambda, which is slightly below the…
It is proposed that the recently announced BICEP2 value of tensor-to scalar ratio $r\sim0.2$ can be explained as containing an extra contribution from the recent acceleration of the universe. In fact this contribution, being robust, recent…
There has been a growing evidence for the existence of magnetic fields in the extra-galactic regions, while the attempt to associate their origin with the inflationary epoch alone has been found extremely challenging. We therefore take into…
We consider the effect of a period of inflation with a high energy density upon the stability of the Higgs potential in the early universe. The recent measurement of a large tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r_T \sim 0.16$, by the BICEP-2 experiment…
We study theories which naturally select a vacuum with parametrically small Electroweak Scale due to finite temperature effects in the early universe. In particular, there is a scalar with an approximate shift symmetry broken by a…
The Higgs field is an attractive candidate for the inflaton because it is an observationally confirmed fundamental scalar field. Importantly, it can be modeled by the most general renormalizable scalar potential. However, if the classical…
Recent analyses that combine the latest data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) with cosmic microwave background observations by BICEP/Keck and Planck, together with the DESI baryon acoustic-baryonic-oscillation (BAO) measurements,…
We construct a hybrid-inflation model where the inflaton potential is generated radiatively, as gauge symmetries guarantee it to be accidentally flat at tree level. The model can be regarded as a small-field version of Natural Inflation,…
In this work, we investigated the electroweak vacuum instability during or after inflation. In the inflationary Universe, i.e., de Sitter space, the vacuum field fluctuations $\left< {\delta \phi }^{ 2 } \right>$ enlarge in proportion to…
We present a new solution to the hierarchy problem, where the Higgs mass is at its observed electroweak value because such a patch inflates the most in the early universe. If the Higgs mass depends on a field undergoing quantum fluctuations…
The measured value of the Higgs quartic coupling $\lambda$ is peculiarly close to the critical value above which the Higgs potential becomes unstable, when extrapolated to high scales by renormalization group running. It is tempting to…
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…
We consider an ultra-light scalar coupled to the Higgs in the presence of heavier new physics. In the electroweak broken phase the Higgs gives a tree-level contribution to the light-scalar potential, while new physics contributes at loop…
We point out that the successful generation of the electroweak scale via gravitational instanton configurations in certain scalar-tensor theories can be viewed as the aftermath of a simple requirement: the existence of a quadratic pole with…
We study the stability of the electroweak vacuum during and after the Starobinsky inflation, assuming the existence of the non-minimal Higgs coupling to the Ricci scalar. In the Starobinsky inflation, there exists $R^2$ term (with $R$ being…