Reconciling Nonminimally Coupled Higgs Inflation with ACT DR6 Observations through Reheating

Abstract

The Higgs inflation model with nonminimal coupling, while disfavored by the 1$\ddot{I}ƒ$ region of the latest Atacama Cosmology Telescope Data Release 6 (ACT DR6) observational data, can be reconciled with the ACT DR6 data by incorporating the effects of reheating. In this paper, we consider reheating with a constant equation of state $w_{re}$. For the strong coupling case $\hat{I}¾=100$, we find that reconciling the model with both the ACT DR6 constraints and the minimum reheating temperature required for successful Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) demands $w_{re}\ge 0.92$. Specifically, the reheating $e$-folding number must be $N_{re}=28.3$ for $w_{re}=0.92$, and within $24.9\le N_{re}\le 27.2$ for $w_{re}=1$. In the more general case without assuming the strong coupling limit, consistency with both ACT and BBN requires the nonminimal coupling to satisfy $\hat{I}¾\ge 0.05$. Our findings suggest that by considering reheating, a wide range of inflationary models, such as $R^2$ inflation, hilltop inflation, E-model inflation, and T-model inflation, can also be made consistent with the ACT DR6 observational data.

9 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in Sci.China Phys.Mech.Astron