Discrepancy between cosmological and electroweak observables in Higgs Inflation

Abstract

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 the effects of the Coleman-Weinberg approximation to the Higgs potential in the primordial universe, connecting the predictions for the Lagrangian parameters at inflationary scales to the electroweak observables through Renormalization Group methods at two-loop order. As the main result, we find that observations on the electroweak scale are in disagreement with the constraints obtained from the cosmological data sets used in the analysis. Specifically, an ≈ 8σ-discrepancy between the inflationary parameters and the electroweak value of the top quark mass is found, which suggests that a significant deviation from the scenario analysed is required by the cosmological data.

Constraining non-minimally coupled $β$-exponential inflation with CMB data

“…Such a mechanism has proven to be able to solve a number of fine-tuning problems of the Standard Cosmology, and also a theory for the origin of structure in the universe that explains the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies and the large-scale distribution of galaxies [2][3][4]. Currently, cosmological observations give very strong support to the inflationary paradigm, showing a preference for plateau over monomial potentials of the inflaton field φ, but still agreeing with several classes of models (see [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] for a recent analysis of different classes of models). On the other hand, the possibility of a non-minimal coupling of the inflaton to gravity has been investigated since the first models of inflation [16][17][18].…”