Multifield dynamics of Higgs inflation
Name
Greenwood-2013-Multifield dynamics of Higgs inflation.pdf
Size
3.13 MB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
b013492fec2e7a61b95c8e712e7c9619
Author(s)
Greenwood, Ross N.
Kaiser, David I.
Sfakianakis, Evangelos I.
Date Issued
March 2013
Journal
Physical Review D
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Greenwood, Ross N., David I. Kaiser, and Evangelos I. Sfakianakis. “Multifield Dynamics of Higgs Inflation.” Physical Review D 87.6 (2013). © 2013 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Higgs inflation is a simple and elegant model in which early-universe inflation is driven by the Higgs sector of the Standard Model. The Higgs sector can support early-universe inflation if it has a large nonminimal coupling to the Ricci spacetime curvature scalar. At energies relevant to such an inflationary epoch, the Goldstone modes of the Higgs sector remain in the spectrum in renormalizable gauges, and hence their effects should be included in the model’s dynamics. We analyze the multifield dynamics of Higgs inflation and find that the multifield effects damp out rapidly after the onset of inflation, because of the gauge symmetry among the scalar fields in this model. Predictions from Higgs inflation for observable quantities, such as the spectral index of the power spectrum of primordial perturbations, therefore revert to their familiar single-field form, in excellent agreement with recent measurements. The methods we develop here may be applied to any multifield model with nonminimal couplings in which the N fields obey an SO(N) symmetry in field space.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.87.064021
