Higgs condensation as an unwanted curvaton

Abstract

During inflation in the early universe, the Higgs field continuously acquires long-wave quantum fluctuations. They accumulate to yield a non-vanishing value with an exponentially large correlation length. We study consequences of such Higgs condensations to show that, in inflation models where the universe is reheated through gravitational particle production at the transition to the kination regime, they not only contribute to reheat the universe but also act as a curvaton. Unfortunately, however, for parameters of the Standard Model Higgs field, this curvaton produces density fluctuations too large, so the inflation models followed by a long kination regime are ruled out.Comment: 13 pages; v2, layout adjusted, references adde

Inflationary cosmology: First 30+ years

“…Since the shift symmetry of the original Lagrangian prevents direct interaction between φ and standard-model sector, reheating proceeds only through gravitational particle production. 78,79 The reheating temperature in such a case is given by (58).…”

Note on reheating inGinflation

“…There is the danger (see e.g. [35] for an initial study and [36] for recent work) that the induced entropy fluctuations might induce too large curvature perturbations, as it does in the model studied in [37]. A study of this question will be the focus of future work.…”

“…Following [37], the expression (56) for the energy density can be rewritten as (59) where µ is a regularization scale which has been introduced to remove the ultraviolet divergence. Note that the derivative of V in the above equation is with respect to conformal time.…”

No quasistable scalaron lump forms afterR2inflation

“…Based on the above gravitationally induced couplings, the scalaron decay rate is given by [36,37] (also see [39, 2 Even though the universe has not been thermalized before the scalaron decay, homogeneous Higgs condensate [38] that is formed during inflation starts to oscillate soon after inflation and decays into quarks and gauge fields, with which a Higgs boson is in thermal equilibrium and acquires thermal mass ∼ λχT ≈ 0.1g…”