Perturbations in pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone Higgs inflation

Abstract Pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone (pNG) Higgs Inflation is a novel approach to relate the Higgs boson and its interaction with Electroweak gauge bosons with cosmic inflation, with the potential of solving both the fine-tuning issues in the Higgs mass and inflationary potentials. In this work, we present a linear perturbation analysis of the minimal implementation of pNG Higgs inflation using the symmetry coset SU(5)/SO(5). Similar to Chromo-natural inflation, this model exhibits a period of instability in the tensor modes that exponentially enhance left-handed gravitational waves. Thus, large Chern-Simons couplings β ≳ 6 × 10 8 and decay constants f ≳ 1 × 10 18 GeV are required to suppress the tensor-to-scalar ratio r to be compatible with the cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurement. These large couplings also cause an overproduction of the scalar modes, making the minimal construction of pNG Higgs inflation disfavored by CMB observations. However, this tension could potentially be relieved by considering multi-field inflation. The pNG Higgs construction naturally contains multiple scalar fields via the interplay of spontaneously broken global and gauge symmetries. The rich structure enables a broad range of multi-field inflation, and we conclude by briefly discussing this possibility and future work.