Radiative-Corrected Higgs Inflation in Light of the Latest ACT Observations

Abstract

Recent measurements from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), particularly when combined with DESI baryon acoustic oscillation data, have reported a scalar spectral index $n_s$ slightly higher than that inferred by {\it Planck}~2018, suggesting a mild tension with the predictions of standard inflationary attractor models. In this work, we revisit the quantum-corrected Higgs inflation scenario within the framework of a non-minimally coupled scalar field theory. Starting from the one-loop effective action, we incorporate radiative corrections through the anomalous scaling parameter ${\mathbf{A}}_{\mathbf{I}}$ and derive analytic expressions for the inflationary observables $n_s$ and $r$ in the Einstein frame. Our analysis demonstrates that quantum corrections naturally shift $n_s$ toward higher values while keeping the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ suppressed. For $\mathcal{N}=60$, the model predicts $n_s\simeq 0.9743$ and $r\simeq 5.4\times 10^{-3}$, in excellent agreement with the latest ACT+DESI (P-ACT-LB) data and fully consistent with the \textit{Planck}~2018 limit $r<0.036$. The derived constraint $4.36\times 10^{-10}<\lambda /{\xi }^2<10.77\times 10^{-10}$ confirms the robustness of the quantum-corrected Higgs framework and indicates that near-future CMB polarization experiments such as CORE, AliCPT, LiteBIRD, and CMB-S4 will be able to probe the predicted parameter space with high precision.

v2: version accepted for publication in Physics Letters B, more references added, 9 pages, 1 figure

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