Higgs inflation as a mirage

• DOI: 10.1007/jhep09(2015)027
• Publication Date: 2015-09-08T15:15:44Z
• Authors: J. L. F. Barbón; J. A. Casas; J. Elias-Miró; J. R. Espinosa
• Keywords: High Energy Physics - Theory; Nuclear and High Energy Physics; Higgs Physics; Física; FOS: Physical sciences; Higgs physics; Cosmology of Theories beyond the SM; 01 natural sciences; High Energy Physics - Phenomenology; High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph); High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th); Cosmology of theories beyond the SM; Beyond Standard Model; 0103 physical sciences; Beyond standard model; Standard model

21 pages, 2 figures<br/>We discuss a simple unitarization of Higgs inflation that is genuinely weakly coupled up to Planckian energies. A large non-minimal coupling between the Higgs and the Ricci curvature is induced dynamically at intermediate energies, as a simple ratio of mass scales. Despite not being dominated by the Higgs field, inflationary dynamics simulates the `Higgs inflation' one would get by blind extrapolation of the low-energy effective Lagrangian, at least qualitatively. Hence, Higgs inflation arises as an approximate `mirage' picture of the true dynamics. We further speculate on the generality of this phenomenon and show that, if Higgs-inflation arises as an effective description, the details of the UV completion are necessary to extract robust quantitative predictions.<br/>