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arXiv · 1501.02231

Higgs Inflation as a Mirage

Abstract

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.

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J. L. F. Barbon, J. A. Casas, J. Elias-Miro, J. R. Espinosa. 2015-01-09. Higgs Inflation as a Mirage. https://arxiv.org/abs/1501.02231

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