Higgs Inflation and General Initial Conditions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how general initial conditions in Higgs inflation can enhance the tensor-to-scalar ratio, potentially aligning it better with observational data while remaining consistent with non-Gaussianity constraints.

Contribution

It demonstrates that certain initial conditions in Higgs inflation can increase the tensor-to-scalar ratio without violating non-Gaussianity bounds.

Findings

Certain initial conditions enhance the tensor-to-scalar ratio r.

Enhanced r values are consistent with observational bounds.

The parameter space for initial conditions is constrained by non-Gaussianity limits.

Abstract

Higgs field of particle physics can play the role of the inflaton in the early universe, if it is non-minimally coupled to gravity. The Higgs inflation scenario predicts a small tensor to scalar ratio: $r\simeq 0.003$. Although this value is consistent with the upper bound $r < 0.12$ given by BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck data, but it is not at their maximum likelihood point: $r\simeq 0.05$. Inflationary observables depend not only on the inflationary models, but also depend on the initial conditions of inflation. Changing initial state of inflation can improve the value of $r$. In this work, we study the Higgs inflation model under general initial conditions and show that there is a subset of these general initial conditions which leads to enhancement of $r$. Then we show that this region of parameter space is consistent with non-Gaussianity bound.