The Selfish Higgs and Reheating

Abstract

We consider the cosmological relaxation of the Higgs mass and the cosmological constant due to the four-form fluxes in four dimensions. We present a general class of models with a singlet scalar field containing four-form couplings where the Higgs mass is relaxed to a right value and the Universe reheats to a sufficiently high reheating temperature after the last membrane nucleation. We also discuss some of interesting features in the cases of singlet scalar fields with non-minimal or minimal couplings to gravity and show how the new scalar fields can play a role for dark matter production.

Comments: 19 pages, no figures, v2: typos corrected, v3: reheating and dark matter production discussed. v4: accepted for publication in JHEP, comments on the gap problem made