Phenomenological consequences of Higgs inflation in the NMSSM at the electroweak scale

Abstract

The Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) can incorporate inflation, where a combination of the Higgs-doublet fields plays the role of the inflaton. At the high scale, the Higgs doublets are non-minimally coupled to supergravity; this coupling appears as an additional contribution to the $\mu$ term in the low-energy effective superpotential and potentially changes physics at the electroweak scale. In a recent publication, we investigate the extended parameter space of this model with respect to collider phenomenology at the electroweak scale, and discuss scenarios which are potentially different from the pure NMSSM. We analyse the stability of the electroweak vacuum, the masses of neutralinos/charginos and Higgs bosons as well as the mixing and decays of Higgs bosons. Some important aspects of this study are described in the following.