Higgs Inflation with a Gauss-Bonnet term in the Jordan Frame

Understand

We consider an extension of Higgs inflation in which the Higgs field is coupled to the Gauss-Bonnet term.

• Working solely in the Jordan frame, we firstly recover the standard predictions of Higgs inflation without a Gauss-Bonnet term.
• We then calculate the power spectra for scalar and tensor perturbations in the presence of a coupling to a Gauss-Bonnet term.
• We show that generically the predictions of Higgs inflation are robust and the contributions to the power spectra coming from the Gauss-Bonnet term are negligible.