COSMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS ON THE HIGGS BOSON MASS

For a robust interpretation of upcoming observations from PLANCK and Large Hadron Collider experiments it is imperative to understand how the inflationary dynamics of a non-minimally coupled Higgs scalar field with gravity may affect the determination of the inflationary observables. We make a full proper analysis of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, Type Ia supernova distance-redshift relation, and the baryon acoustic oscillations data sets in a context of the non-minimally coupled Higgs inflation field with gravity. For the central value of the top quark pole mass mT = 171.3 GeV, the fit of the inflation model with a non-minimally coupled Higgs scalar field leads to a Higgs boson mass in the range 143.7 GeV ≤ mH ≤ 167 GeV (95% CL). We show that the inflation driven by a non-minimally coupled scalar field to the Einstein gravity leads to significant constraints on the scalar spectral index nS and the tensor-to-scalar ratio R when compared with a tensor with similar constraints to form the standard inflation with a minimally coupled scalar field. We also show that an accurate reconstruction of the Higgs potential in terms of inflationary observables requires an improved accuracy of other parameters of the standard model of particle physics such as the top quark mass and the effective QCD coupling constant.