Higgs inflation is still alive after the results from BICEP2

Phys Rev Lett. 2014 Jun 20;112(24):241301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.241301. Epub 2014 Jun 16.

Abstract

The observed value of the Higgs boson mass indicates that the Higgs potential becomes small and flat at the scale around 10(17) GeV. Having this fact in mind, we reconsider the Higgs inflation scenario proposed by Bezrukov and Shaposhnikov. It turns out that the nonminimal coupling ξ of the Higgs squared to the Ricci scalar can be smaller than 10. For example, ξ=7 corresponds to the tensor-to-scalar ratio r≃0.2, which is consistent with the recent observation by BICEP2.