2017/06/30 by Walter Tangarife, Kohsaku Tobioka, Lorenzo Ubaldi +1 · 2 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Curvature #Cutoff #Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution #Electroweak interaction #Electroweak scale #False vacuum #Hierarchy problem #Inflation (cosmology) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Planck #Standard Model (mathematical formulation) #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/jhep02(2018)084
published as JHEP02(2018)084 · 39 pages, 3 figures, appendices D and E added, published in JHEP
openalex created_date 2017/06/23 · openalex publication_date 2018/02/01 · arxiv created 2018/02/19 · arxiv updated 2018/02/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The cosmological relaxation of the electroweak scale has been proposed as a mechanism to address the hierarchy problem of the Standard Model. A field, the relaxion, rolls down its potential and, in doing so, scans the squared mass parameter of the Higgs, relaxing it to a parametrically small value. In this work, we promote the relaxion to an inflaton. We couple it to Abelian gauge bosons, thereby introducing the necessary dissipation mechanism which slows down the field in the last stages. We describe a novel reheating mechanism, which relies on the gauge-boson production leading to strong electro-magnetic fields, and proceeds via the vacuum production of electron-positron pairs through the Schwinger effect. We refer to this mechanism as Schwinger reheating. We discuss the cosmological dynamics of the model and the phenomenological constraints from CMB and other experiments. We find that a cutoff close to the Planck scale may be achieved. In its minimal form, the model does not generate sufficient curvature perturbations and additional ingredients, such as a curvaton field, are needed.