Abstract
We study the role of the Standard Model Higgs condensate, formed during cosmological inflation, in the epoch of reheating that follows. We focus on the scenario where the inflaton decays slowly and perturbatively, so that there is a long period between the end of inflation and the beginning of radiation domination. The Higgs condensate decays nonperturbatively during this period, and we show that it heats the primordial plasma to much higher temperatures than would result from the slowly decaying inflaton alone. We discuss the effect of this hot plasma on the thermalization of the inflaton's decay products, and study its phenomenological implications for the formation of cosmological relics like dark matter, with associated isocurvature fluctuations, and the restoration of the electroweak and Peccei-Quinn symmetries.
Highlights
The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 provided the final piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, and stimulated the realization that the Higgs is of fundamental significance to cosmology
We have studied the role of the Standard Model Higgs field during the epoch of reheating after inflation
The Higgs forms a condensate during inflation, and we have focused on its behavior in the scenario where the inflaton decays slowly, having a small perturbative decay rate Γφ ≪ m3φ=M2Pl
Summary
The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 provided the final piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, and stimulated the realization that the Higgs is of fundamental significance to cosmology. The Higgs condensate decays by parametric resonance in a completely Standard Model process [22,23] This produces an effectively thermal plasmas at some time Nh-therm not long after the end of inflation, with temperature. We show that this temperature will generally have inhomogeneities on large scales uncorrelated with the adiabatic fluctuations sourced by the inflaton.
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