Abstract
The properties of the recently discovered Higgs boson together with the absence of new physics at collider experiments allows us to speculate about consistently extending the Standard Model of particle physics all the way up to the Planck scale. In this context, the Standard Model Higgs non-minimally coupled to gravity could be responsible for the symmetry properties of the Universe at large scales and for the generation of the primordial spectrum of curvature perturbations seeding structure formation. We overview the minimalistic Higgs inflation scenario, its predictions, open issues and extensions and discuss its interplay with the possible metastability of the Standard Model vacuum.
Highlights
This flatness is usually related to the existence of some approximate shift-symmetry, which, for the purposes of Higgs inflation, is convenient to reformulate as a non-linear realization of approximate scale-invariance
From a bottom-up perspective, new physics was typically advocated to cure the divergences associated with the potential growth of the Higgs self-coupling at high energies
The finding of a relatively light Higgs boson in the Large Hadron Collider concluded the quest of the Standard Model spectrum while demystifying the concept of naturalness and the role of fundamental scalar fields in particle physics and cosmology
Summary
Inflation is nowadays a well-established paradigm (Starobinsky, 1980; Guth, 1981; Mukhanov and Chibisov, 1981; Albrecht and Steinhardt, 1982; Linde, 1982, 1983) able to explain the flatness, homogeneity and isotropy of the Universe and the generation of the primordial density fluctuations seeding structure formation (Hawking, 1982; Starobinsky, 1982; Sasaki, 1986; Mukhanov, 1988). The finite parts of the counterterms needed to renormalize the tree-level action lead to localized jumps in the SM renormalization group equations when connected to the chiral phase of Higgs inflation The strength of these jumps encodes the remnants of the ultraviolet completion and cannot be determined within effective field theory approach (Bezrukov et al, 2011b, 2015; Burgess et al, 2014). If the finite parts are significantly smaller than the associated coupling constants, Higgs inflation leads to a direct connection among the SM parameters measured at collider experiments and the large scale properties of the Universe, provided that the former do not give rise to vacuum instability. We intend to complement the existing monographs in the literature (Bezrukov, 2013; Bezrukov and Shaposhnikov, 2015a; Moss, 2015) by i) providing a further insight on the classical formulation of Higgs inflation and by ii) focusing on the uncertainties associated with the non-renormalizability of the theory and their impact on model building
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