Inflation scenario driven by a low energy physics inflaton

Abstract

It is a longstanding desire of cosmologists, and particle physicists as well, to connect inflation to low energy physics, culminating, for instance, in what is known as Higgs inflation. The condition for the standard Higgs boson playing the role of the inflaton, and driving successfully inflation, is that it couples nonminimally with gravity. Nevertheless, cosmological constraints impose that the nonminimal coupling be large. This causes the loss of perturbative unitarity in a scale of energy far below the Planck one. Our aim in this work is to point out that inflaton potential containing a particular type of trilinear coupling involving the inflaton may circumvent this problem by realizing Higgs inflation with tiny nonminimal coupling of the inflaton with gravity. We then develop the idea within a toy model and implement it in the inverse type-II seesaw mechanism for small neutrinos masses.Comment: Minor changes, reheating rediscussed, references updated, final version to appear in the PR