Successful Higgs inflation from combined nonminimal and derivative couplings

Understand

We propose an inflationary scenario based on the concurrent presence of non-minimal coupling (NMC) and generalized non-minimal derivative coupling (GNMDC), in the context of Higgs inflation.

• The combined construction maintains the advantages of the individual scenarios without sharing their disadvantages.
• In particular, a long inflationary phase can be easily achieved due to the gravitational friction effect owed to the GNMDC, without leading to trans-Planckian values and unitarity violation.
• Additionally, the tensor-to-scalar ratio remains to low values due to the NMC contribution.