Meaning of prescriptions I and II in Higgs inflation [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1610.05885


We consider the prescription dependence of the Higgs effective potential under the presence of general non-minimal couplings. We evaluate the fermion loop correction to the effective action in a simplified Higgs-Yukawa model whose path integral measure takes simple form either in the Jordan or Einstein frame. The resultant effective action becomes identical in both cases when we properly take into account the quartically divergent term coming from the change of measure. Working in the counter-term formalism, we clarify that the difference between the prescriptions I and II comes from the counter term to cancel the logarithmic divergence. This difference can be absorbed into the choice of tree-level potential from the infinitely many possibilities, including all the higher-dimensional terms. We also present another mechanism to obtain a flat potential by freezing the running of the effective quartic coupling for large field values, using the non-minimal coupling in the gauge kinetic function.

Read this paper on arXiv…

Y. Hamada, H. Kawai, Y. Nakanishi, et. al.
Thu, 20 Oct 16
40/44

Comments: 19 pages