Phenomenology of the inflation-inspired NMSSM at the electroweak scale

TL;DR

This paper investigates the phenomenology of an inflation-inspired NMSSM model with non-minimal gravity coupling, analyzing its implications for electroweak scale physics, Higgs properties, and vacuum stability.

Contribution

It introduces an extended NMSSM framework incorporating inflationary non-minimal coupling, exploring its phenomenological differences from the standard NMSSM at the electroweak scale.

Findings

Identifies parameter regions compatible with a 125 GeV Higgs boson.

Analyzes the impact of non-minimal coupling on Higgs mixing and decays.

Examines electroweak vacuum stability within the extended model.

Abstract

The concept of Higgs inflation can be elegantly incorporated in the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM). A linear combination of the two Higgs-doublet fields plays the role of the inflaton which is non-minimally coupled to gravity. This non-minimal coupling appears in the low-energy effective superpotential and changes the phenomenology at the electroweak scale. While the field content of the inflation-inspired model is the same as in the NMSSM, there is another contribution to the $\mu$ term in addition to the vacuum expectation value of the singlet. We explore this extended parameter space and point out scenarios with phenomenological differences compared to the pure NMSSM. A special focus is set on the electroweak vacuum stability and the parameter dependence of the Higgs and neutralino sectors. We highlight regions which yield a SM-like $125\,$GeV Higgs boson compatible with the experimental observations and are in accordance with the limits from searches for additional Higgs bosons. Finally, we study the impact of the non-minimal coupling to gravity on the Higgs mixing and in turn on the decays of the Higgs bosons in this model.