Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: If Higgs is a spectator scalar, i.e. if it is not directly coupled to the inflaton, superhorizon Higgs modes must have been exited during inflation. Since Higgs is unstable its decay into photons is expected to seed superhorizon photon modes. We use in-in perturbation theory to show that this naive physical expectation is indeed fulfilled via loop effects. Specifically, we calculate the first order Higgs loop correction to the magnetic field power spectrum evaluated at some late time after inflation. It turns out that this loop correction becomes much larger than the tree-level power spectrum at the superhorizon scales. This suggests a mechanism to generate cosmologically interesting superhorizon vector modes by scalar-vector interactions.
Author: Ali Kaya
Institution: Boğaziçi University
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2782979894