Palatini-Higgs inflation with non-minimal derivative coupling

TL;DR

This paper explores how adding a non-minimal derivative coupling to Palatini-Higgs inflation can increase the tensor-to-scalar ratio, making the model more testable with upcoming observational data.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized non-minimal derivative coupling to Palatini-Higgs inflation, aligning its predictions with the metric formalism and observational prospects.

Findings

The coupling raises the tensor-to-scalar ratio in Palatini inflation.

Modified Palatini model predictions become comparable to metric formalism.

Enhanced model observability with future experiments.

Abstract

The predictions of standard Higgs inflation in the framework of the metric formalism yield a tensor-to-scalar ratio $r \sim 10^{-3}$ which lies well within the expected accuracy of near-future experiments $ \sim 10^{-4}$. When the Palatini formalism is employed, the predicted values of $r$ get highly-suppressed $r\sim 10^{-12}$ and consequently a possible non-detection of primordial tensor fluctuations will rule out only the metric variant of the model. On the other hand, the extremely small values predicted for $r$ by the Palatini approach constitute contact with observations a hopeless task for the foreseeable future. In this work, we propose a way to remedy this issue by extending the action with the inclusion of a generalized non-minimal derivative coupling term between the inflaton and the Einstein tensor of the form $m^{-2}(\phi) G_{\mu\nu}\nabla^{\mu}\phi \nabla^{\nu}\phi$. We find that with such a modification, the Palatini predictions can become comparable with the ones obtained in the metric formalism, thus providing ample room for the model to be in contact with observations in the near future.