Eternal Inflation and Reheating in the Presence of the Standard Model Higgs Field

Understand

We study the details of eternal inflation in the presence of a spectator Higgs field within the framework of the minimal Standard Model.

• We have recently shown that in the presence of scalar field(s) which allow inflation only within a finite domain of field values, the universe reaches a steady state where the normalized distribution for the field(s) converges to a steady state distribution [1].
• In this paper, we analyze this eternal inflation scenario with the renormalized Standard Model Higgs potential, since it also allows inflation in a finite domain, but turns over at high scales due to the running of the self-coupling, marking an exit from inflation.
• We compute the full steady state distribution for the Higgs using an integral evolution technique that we formulated in [1] and the fractal dimension of the universe.