Inflation scenario via the Standard Model Higgs boson and LHC

TL;DR

The work assesses the possibility of Higgs-driven inflation with a large non-minimal coupling to gravity, showing that radiative corrections controlled by the anomalous scaling A significantly alter the inflationary dynamics. By deriving the Jordan-frame effective action and computing the resulting slow-roll parameters and perturbation spectra, the authors connect CMB observables to the heavy particle spectrum coupled to the inflaton. They find that current Standard Model Higgs mass bounds (m_H ≈ 180 GeV) rule out Higgs-driven inflation, while a heavier Higgs around 230 GeV could produce n_s ≈ 0.935 and an extremely small r ≈ 0.0006. The viability of the scenario thus hinges on future Higgs measurements and LHC results, which would either falsify or, in a heavier-Higgs case, resurrect this inflationary mechanism.

Abstract

We consider a quantum corrected inflation scenario driven by a generic GUT or Standard Model type particle model whose scalar field playing the role of an inflaton has a strong non-minimal coupling to gravity. We show that currently widely accepted bounds on the Higgs mass falsify the suggestion of the paper arXiv:0710.3755 (where the role of radiative corrections was underestimated) that the Standard Model Higgs boson can serve as the inflaton. However, if the Higgs mass could be raised to $\sim 230$ GeV, then the Standard Model could generate an inflationary scenario with the spectral index of the primordial perturbation spectrum $n_s\simeq 0.935$ (barely matching present observational data) and the very low tensor-to-scalar perturbation ratio $r\simeq 0.0006$.