Reheating with a composite Higgs boson

Abstract

The flatness of the inflaton potential and lightness of the Higgs could have the common origin of the breaking of a global symmetry. This scenario provides a unified framework of Goldstone Inflation and Composite Higgs, where the inflaton and the Higgs both have a pseudo--Goldstone boson nature. The inflaton reheats the Universe via decays to the Higgs and subsequent secondary production of other SM particles via the top and massive vector bosons. We find that inflationary predictions and perturbative reheating conditions are consistent with CMB data for sub--Planckian values of the fields, as well as opening up the possibility of inflation at the TeV scale. We explore this exciting possibility, leading to an interplay between collider data and cosmological constraints.