Field redefinitions, perturbative unitarity and Higgs inflation
For inflation driven by the Higgs field coupled non-minimally to gravity, we study the cutoff energy scale above which perturbation theory breaks down. Employing the metric formulation, we first give an overview of known results and then provide a new way to calculate a lower bound on the cutoff. Our approach neither relies on a gauge choice nor does it require any calculation of amplitudes. Instead, it exploits the fact that the S-matrix is invariant under field redefinitions. In agreement with previous findings, we demonstrate that the cutoff is significantly higher during inflation than in vacuum, which ensures the robustness of semi-classical predictions. Along the way, we generalize our findings to the Palatini formulation and comment on a useful parametrization of the Higgs doublet in both scenarios.
JHEP06(2022)132.pdf
Publisher's Version
Published version
openaccess
CC BY
388.9 KB
Adobe PDF
be53527c5a7b2d0b1314be0caab21fc7