Holographic bounds and Higgs inflation

Abstract

In a recently proposed scenario for primordial inflation, where the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson plays a role of the inflation field, an effective field theory (EFT) approach is the most convenient for working out the consequences of breaking of perturbative unitarity, caused by the strong coupling of the Higgs field to the Ricci scalar. The domain of validity of the EFT approach is given by the ultraviolet (UV) cutoff, which, roughly speaking, should always exceed the Hubble parameter in the course of inflation. On the other hand, applying the trusted principles of quantum gravity to a local EFT demands that it should only be used to describe states in a region larger than their corresponding Schwarschild radius, manifesting thus a sort of UV/IR correspondence. We consider both constraints on EFT, to ascertain which models of the SM Higgs inflation are able to simultaneously comply with them. We also show that if the gravitational coupling evolves with the scale factor, the holographic constraint can be alleviated significantly with minimal set of canonical assumptions, by forcing the said coupling to be asymptotically free.