Is Cosmological Constant Needed in Higgs Inflation?

Abstract

The detection of B-mode shows a very powerful constraint to theoretical inflation models through the measurement of the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$. Higgs boson is the most likely candidate of the inflaton field. But usually, Higgs inflation models predict a small value of $r$, which is not quite consistent with the recent results from BICEP2. In this paper, we explored whether a cosmological constant energy component is needed to improve the situation. And we found the answer is yes. For the so-called Higgs chaotic inflation model with a quadratic potential, it predicts $r\approx 0.2$, $n_s\approx0.96$ with e-folds number $N\approx 56$, which is large enough to overcome the problems such as the horizon problem in the Big Bang cosmology. The required energy scale of the cosmological constant is roughly $\Lambda \sim (10^{14} \text{GeV})^2 $, which means a mechanism is still needed to solve the fine-tuning problem in the later time evolution of the universe, e.g. by introducing some dark energy component.