The Role of Matter Loops and Kinetic Mixing in Higgs Portal Inflation

Abstract

Cosmological inflation has emerged as a cornerstone of modern cosmology because it elegantly accounts for the Universe’s large scale homogeneity, flatness and the nearly scale invariant spectrum of primordial fluctuations, but many of its underlying dynamical details remain elusive. In this context, the present thesis investigates Higgs-portal inflation, focusing on quantum corrections from matter loops involving scalars, fermions, and gauge bosons. We incorporate these effects by evolving the model’s couplings from the electroweak scale to the inflationary scale. We also emphasizes how the induced kinetic mixing arising from the conformal transformation in the Einstein frame affect inflationary dynamics.