Relaxation of Higgs mass and cosmological constant with four-form fluxes and reheating

Abstract

We consider the most general effective action for the four-form fluxes in the Standard Model coupled to gravity. The Higgs mass parameter can be relaxed to a correct value due to the four-form coupling to the Higgs field and it stops changing due to an extremely suppressed transition probability from the observed cosmological constant to AdS space. We first introduce a non-minimal four-form coupling to gravity and discuss the role of a new scalar field as the inflaton and the conditions for a successful reheating at the end of relaxation.

Comments: 14 pages, no figures, v2: discussion on reheating revised, conclusions unchanged, references added, v3: extended and improved discussion on reheating before and after last membrane nucleation, To be published in JHEP. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1910.09171