Curvaton Decay by Resonant Production of the Standard Model Higgs

Abstract

We investigate in detail a model where the curvaton is coupled to the Standard Model higgs. Parametric resonance might be expected to cause a fast decay of the curvaton, so that it would not have time to build up the curvature perturbation. However, we show that this is not the case, and that the resonant decay of the curvaton may be delayed even down to electroweak symmetry breaking. This delay is due to the coupling of the higgs to the thermal background, which is formed by the Standard Model degrees of freedom created from the inflaton decay. We establish the occurrence of the delay by considering the curvaton evolution and the structure of the higgs resonances. We then provide analytical expressions for the delay time, and for the subsequent resonant production of the higgs, which ultimately leads to the curvaton effective decay width. Contrary to expectations, it is possible to obtain the observed curvature perturbation for values of the curvaton-higgs coupling as large as 0.1. Our calculations also apply in the general case of curvaton decay into any non Standard Model species coupled to the thermal background.

39 pages, 2 figures. v2 matches published version (one reference added)

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• Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
• Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC
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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Electroweak Vacuum Stability in light of BICEP2
• Non-Abelian dynamics in the resonant decay of the Higgs after inflation
• On finite density effects on cosmic reheating and moduli decay and implications for Dark Matter production
• Thermal blocking of preheating
• Preheating with higher dimensional interaction