The Selfish Higgs and Reheating

TL;DR

This paper explores a cosmological model where four-form fluxes relax the Higgs mass and cosmological constant, ensuring high reheating temperatures and potential dark matter production through scalar fields with various gravitational couplings.

Contribution

It introduces a class of models with singlet scalar fields and four-form couplings that achieve Higgs mass relaxation and high-temperature reheating, with implications for dark matter.

Findings

Higgs mass is successfully relaxed to the observed value.

The Universe reheats to a high temperature after membrane nucleation.

Scalar fields can contribute to dark matter production.

Abstract

We consider the cosmological relaxation of the Higgs mass and the cosmological constant due to the four-form fluxes in four dimensions. We present a general class of models with a singlet scalar field containing four-form couplings where the Higgs mass is relaxed to a right value and the Universe reheats to a sufficiently high reheating temperature after the last membrane nucleation. We also discuss some of interesting features in the cases of singlet scalar fields with non-minimal or minimal couplings to gravity and show how the new scalar fields can play a role for dark matter production.