Trail of the Higgs in the primordial spectrum

Abstract

We study the effects of the Higgs directly coupled to the inflaton on the primordial power spectrum. The quadratic coupling between the Higgs and the inflaton stabilizes the Higgs in the electroweak vacuum during inflation by inducing a large effective mass for the Higgs, which also leads to oscillatory features in the primordial power spectrum due to the oscillating classical background. Meanwhile, the features from quantum fluctuations exhibit simple monotonic k-dependence and are subleading compared to the classical contributions. We also comment on the collider searches.