The Standard Model Higgs as the origin of the hot Big Bang

Abstract

If the Standard Model (SM) Higgs is weakly coupled to the inflationary sector, the Higgs is expected to be universally in the form of a condensate towards the end of inflation. The Higgs decays rapidly after inflation – via non-perturbative effects – into an out-of-equilibrium distribution of SM species, which thermalize soon afterwards. If the post-inflationary equation of state of the universe is stiff, w≃+1, the SM species eventually dominate the total energy budget. This provides a natural origin for the relativistic thermal plasma of SM species, required for the onset of the ‘hot Big Bang’ era. The viability of this scenario requires the inflationary Hubble scale H⁎ to be lower than the instability scale for Higgs vacuum decay, the Higgs not to generate too large curvature perturbations at cosmological scales, and the SM dominance to occur before Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. We show that successful reheating into the SM can only be obtained in the presence of a non-minimal coupling to gravity ξ≳1, with a reheating temperature of TRH≳O(1010)ξ3/2(H⁎/1014 GeV)2 GeV.