The inflaton that could: primordial black holes and second order gravitational waves from tachyonic instability induced in Higgs-R 2 inflation

Abstract

The running of the Higgs self coupling may lead to numerous phenomena in early universe cosmology. In this paper we introduce a scenario where the Higgs running induces turns in the trajectory passing a region with tachyonic mass, leading to a temporal tachyonic growth in the curvature power spectrum. This effect induced by the Higgs leaves phenomena in the form of primordial black holes and stochastic gravitational waves, where proposed GW observatories will be able to probe in the near future.