Hearing Higgs with Gravitational Wave Detectors

Understand

The relic gravitational wave background due to tensor linear perturbations generated during Higgs inflation is computed.

• Both the Standard Model and a well-motivated phenomenological completion (that accounts for all the experimentally confirmed evidence of new physics) are considered.
• We focus on critical Higgs inflation, which improves on the non-critical version and features an amplification of the tensor fluctuations.
• The latter property allows us to establish that future space-borne interferometers, such as DECIGO, BBO and ALIA, may detect the corresponding primordial gravitational waves.