Higgs inflation, unitarity, and emergence of scalaron

by Yohei Ema (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY)

Thursday 4 Aug 2022, 13:30 → 14:30 Europe/Zurich

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

Higgs inflation introduces a large non-minimal coupling between the Ricci scalar and Higgs that makes the cut-off scale well below the Planck scale. In the first part of the talk, we show that unitarity is indeed violated by a resonant production of longitudinal gauge bosons after inflation, calling for UV completion of Higgs inflation. We then show that unitarity is restored after summing over vacuum polarization-type diagrams that are leading-order in the large-N limit. Scattering amplitude develops a pole after the resummation, which we identify as the scalar component of the metric, or the scalaron. This phenomenon can be understood in the language of the non-linear sigma model (NLSM), with the scalaron identified as the sigma-meson that linearizes the NLSM.