Higgs inflation, unitarity, and emergence of scalaron
Starts 18 Feb 2020 14:30
Ends 18 Feb 2020 16:00
Central European Time
ICTP
Leonardo Building - Luigi Stasi Seminar Room
Abstract. The vanilla Higgs inflation introduces a large non-minimal coupling between the Ricci scalar and Higgs that causes tree-level unitarity violation well below the Planck scale. After reviewing the unitarity issue during and after inflation, we show that the unitarity can be restored by summing over vacuum polarization-type diagrams. The scattering amplitude develops a pole after the resummation, which we identify as the scalar component of the metric, or the scalaron. It suggests that the Higgs inflation is actually a multi-field inflation model, i.e. Higgs nad the scalaron, and does not suffer from the unitarity issue.