6 research outputs found
Higgs field in cosmology
The accelerated expansion of the early universe is an integral part of modern
cosmology and dynamically realized by the mechanism of inflation. The simplest
theoretical description of the inflationary paradigm is based on the assumption
of an additional propagating scalar degree of freedom which drives inflation -
the inflaton. In most models of inflation the fundamental nature of the
inflaton remains unexplained. In the model of Higgs inflation, the inflaton is
identified with the Standard Model Higgs boson and connects cosmology with
elementary particle physics. A characteristic feature of this model is a
non-minimal coupling of the Higgs boson to gravity. I review and discuss
several phenomenological and fundamental aspects of this model, including the
impact of quantum corrections and the renormalization group, the derivation of
initial conditions for Higgs inflation in a quantum cosmological framework and
the classical and quantum equivalence of different field parametrizations.Comment: 36 pages, 9 figures; references added, typos corrected. Invited
contribution to the Heraeus-Seminar "Hundred Years of Gauge Theory", 30 July
- 3 August 2018, Physikzentrum Bad Honnef, organized by Silvia De Bianchi and
Claus Kiefer. To appear in the proceedings "100 Years of Gauge Theory. Past,
present and future perspectives" in the series `Fundamental Theories of
Physics' (Springer
Impact of Dynamical Collapse Models on Inflationary Cosmology
Inflation solves several cosmological problems at the classical and quantum level, with a strong agreement between the theoretical predictions of well-motivated inflationary models and observations. In this Letter, we study the corrections induced by dynamical collapse models, which phenomenologically solve the quantum measurement problem, to the power spectrum of the comoving curvature perturbation during inflation and the radiation-dominated era. We find that the corrections are strongly negligible for the reference values of the collapse parameters