Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 191302 (2012)

By the end of the year, as the excellent performance of the Large Hadron Collider continues, CERN should have a definitive statement on the existence (or not) of a Higgs boson with a mass of about 125 GeV. Isabella Masina and Alessio Notari will no doubt be watching with interest, as they propose an inflation scenario that hinges on the Higgs having a mass in exactly that region.

Masina and Notari have previously explored a model in which, for a narrow range of values of the Higgs mass and of the mass of the top quark, the standard-model potential has a local minimum at an energy scale of 1016 GeV. That local minimum is interesting, because it could feasibly be the starting point for inflation — a period of exponential expansion in the early Universe.

From fits of global data, the precision on the top quark mass has now improved to below the 1-GeV mark, and Masina and Notari's calculations put the Higgs mass at 126±3.5 GeV. One other parameter has now come into play, arising from the inflationary gravitational-wave background, and that's the ratio of tensor to scalar modes — something that the authors say could soon be measureable using apparatus such as ESA's Planck satellite, as a test of their inflation hypothesis.