Primordial non-Gaussianity from the Effects of the Standard Model Higgs during Reheating after Inflation

Abstract

We propose a new way of studying the Higgs potential at extremely high energies. The Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson, as a light spectator field during inflation in the early Universe, can acquire large field values from its quantum fluctuations which vary among different causal (Hubble) patches. Such a space dependence of the Higgs after the end of inflation leads to space-dependent SM particle masses and hence variable efficiency of reheating, when the inflaton decays to Higgsed SM particles. Inhomogeneous reheating results in (observable) temperature anisotropies. Further, the resulting temperature anisotropy spectrum acquires a significant non-Gaussian component, which is constrained by $\text{Planck}$ observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and potentially detectable in next-generation experiments. Constraints on this non-Gaussian signal largely exclude the possibility of the observed temperature anisotropies arising primarily from Higgs effects. Hence, in principle, observational searches for non-Gaussianity in the CMB can be used to constrain the dynamics of the Higgs boson at very high (inflationary) energies.

7 pages, 3 figures, joint submission with arXiv:2009.14218, figures added, important changes, version published in JCAP

References in corpus (10)

• Enhanced Non-Gaussianity from Excited Initial States
• Primordial Curvature Fluctuation and Its Non-Gaussianity in Models with Modulated Reheating
• Higgs Dynamics during Inflation
• The Pursuit of Non-Gaussian Fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background
• Cosmological Perturbations from the Standard Model Higgs
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• Hubble induced mass after inflation in spectator field models
• Novel mechanism for CMB modulation in the Standard Model

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Inflationary interpretation of the stochastic gravitational wave background signal detected by pulsar timing array experiments
• Cosmological Non-Gaussianity from Neutrino Seesaw Mechanism
• Cosmological Signatures of Neutrino Seesaw Mechanism