DPF - PHENO 2024

Hunting for Inflaton at Colliders

16 May 2024, 15:00

15m

David Lawrence Hall 207 (University of Pittsburgh)

Other BSM Physics Beyond the Standard Model

Speaker

Digesh Raut

Description

We consider the non-minimal quartic inflation driven by the U(1)${}_X$ Higgs field $\varphi$ in classically conformal U(1)${}_X$ extended Standard Model (SM). Since the conformal symmetry is broken radiatively, the U(1)${}_X$ gauge boson mass $m_{Z^{\prime }}$, the U(1)${}_X$ gauge coupling $g_X$, and the inflationary predictions for tensor-to-scaler ratio $r$ are determined by only two free parameters, the inflaton mass $m_{\varphi }$ and its mixing angle $\theta$ with the SM Higgs field. We show that the new FASER experiment at the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) can detect the inflaton in both cases if the mass is in the range 0.1 ≲ $m_{\varphi }$ [GeV] ≲ 4. We show that the searches for primordial gravitational waves, collider searches for $Z^{\prime }$ at the LHC, and long-lived particle searches at experiments like FASER are complementary in the hunt for inflation. By performing a comparative study of the metric and Palatini formulations of gravity, we demonstrate that the two formulations are distinguishable.

Presentation materials

DR_Pheno_2024.pdf