Abstract
We consider the possibility of an oscillating scalar field accounting for dark matter and dynamically controlling the spontaneous breaking of the electroweak symmetry through a Higgs-portal coupling. This requires a late decay of the inflaton field, such that thermal effects do not restore the electroweak symmetry after reheating, and so inflation is followed by an inflaton matter-dominated epoch. During inflation, the dark scalar field acquires a large expectation value due to a negative non-minimal coupling to curvature, thus stabilizing the Higgs field by holding it at the origin. After inflation, the dark scalar oscillates in a quartic potential, behaving as dark radiation, and only when its amplitude drops below a critical value does the Higgs field acquire a non-zero vacuum expectation value. The dark scalar then becomes massive and starts behaving as cold dark matter until the present day. We further show that consistent scenarios require dark scalar masses in the few GeV range, which may be probed with future collider experiments.
Highlights
The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) opened up new windows to study the origin and nature of dark matter
This may potentially be avoided if the Higgs field is sufficiently heavy during inflation, which may be achieved by coupling it to other fields such as the inflaton itself [33] or a dark matter scalar as we propose in this work
It is easy to see that, for a sufficiently large value of Φ, the minimum of the Higgs potential will lie at the origin, and it is natural to enquire whether the dark scalar can dynamically drive the spontaneous breaking of the electroweak symmetry [53]
Summary
The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) opened up new windows to study the origin and nature of dark matter. We note that including a positive Higgs nonminimal coupling to curvature would not change the qualitative behavior of the cosmological dynamics, namely the electroweak phase transition, and that this would, help stabilizing the Higgs during inflation in addition to the dark scalar as we discuss below It is easy to see that, for a sufficiently large value of Φ, the minimum of the Higgs potential will lie at the origin, and it is natural to enquire whether the dark scalar can dynamically drive the spontaneous breaking of the electroweak symmetry [53]. As we will see in more detail below, the negative sign of the nonminimal coupling to gravity leads to a large expectation value for the dark scalar during inflation, which makes the Higgs field heavy and stabilizes it at the origin during this period.
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