Tunneling cosmological state revisited: Origin of inflation with a nonminimally coupled standard model Higgs inflaton

Abstract

We suggest a path-integral formulation for the tunneling cosmological state, which admits a consistent renormalization and renormalization group improvement in particle physics applications of quantum cosmology. We apply this formulation to the inflationary cosmology driven by the standard model Higgs boson playing the role of an inflaton with a strong nonminimal coupling to gravity. In this way a complete cosmological scenario is obtained, which embraces the formation of initial conditions for the inflationary background in the form of a sharp probability peak in the distribution of the inflaton field and the ongoing generation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) spectrum on this background. Formation of this probability peak is based on the same renormalization group mechanism which underlies the generation of the CMB spectrum which was recently shown to be compatible with the WMAP data in the Higgs mass range $135.6\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{GeV}\ensuremath{\lesssim}{M}_{\mathrm{H}}\ensuremath{\lesssim}184.5\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{GeV}$. This brings to life a convincing unification of quantum cosmology with the particle phenomenology of the standard model, inflation theory, and CMB observations.