Speaker
Jessica Cook
(Arizona State)
Description
BICEP2 requires new physics to enter into the Higgs effective potential before its instability scale. A large scale for inflation means the Higgs, even if the Higgs isn't the inflaton, should have had fluctuations on order of the Hubble parameter during inflation, and using the ordinary standard model effective potential for the Higgs, this should have pushed the Higgs into it's higher scale minimum. It's interesting to see what new physics could be added that would not only stabilize the Higgs to fix this problem, but might also give a shape to the Higgs potential that would allow for Higgs inflation. Higgs inflation is traditionally done with a non-minimal gravitational coupling used to flatten out the Higgs effective potential at high scales, allowing for successful inflation, but normally the potential gets flattened out too much to produce large tensors. New physics necessitated already by the instability problem, could possibly produce Higgs inflation while avoiding the need for a non-minimal coupling.
Author
Jessica Cook
(Arizona State)
