2025/10/28 by Chowdhury, Tammi, Jenks, Leah, Kolb, Edward W. +1 · 1 citation
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.24651
We study cosmological gravitational particle production (CGPP) in Higgs inflation, wherein the inflaton is a scalar field with quartic self-coupling λ and a nonminimal coupling to gravity ξ, and which may, but need not be, the Higgs boson of the Standard Model (SM). We find an explosive particle production peaked on a characteristic comoving wavenumber k∼ ξ2/3 a H with a peak occupation number that scales with ξ. This new peak in production can easily dominate over the conventional (minimally coupled inflation) CGPP even for modest values of ξ. The results apply for a wide range of ξ, e.g., as low as ξ=10, which can be realized for the Standard Model Higgs given suitable RG flow of the quartic coupling. We discuss implications for late time relics such as dark matter.