Critical Higgs inflation in a viable motivated model

An extension of the Standard Model with three right-handed neutrinos and a simple invisible axion model can account for all experimentally confirmed signals of new physics (neutrino oscillations, dark matter, and baryon asymmetry) in addition to solving the strong CP problem, stabilizing the electroweak vacuum, and satisfying all current observational bounds. We show that this model can also implement critical Higgs inflation, which corresponds to the frontier between stability and metastability of the electroweak vacuum. This leads to a value of the nonminimal coupling between the Higgs and the Ricci scalar that is much lower than the one usually quoted in Higgs inflation away from criticality. Then, an advantage is that the scale of perturbative unitarity breaking on flat spacetime can be very close to the Planck mass, where in any case new physics is required. The higher dimensional operators are under control in this inflationary setup. The dependence of the cutoff on the Higgs background is also taken into account as appropriate when the Higgs is identified with the inflaton. Furthermore, critical Higgs inflation enjoys a robust inflationary attractor that makes it an appealing setup for the early universe. In the proposed model, unlike in the Standard Model, critical Higgs inflation can be realized without any tension with the observed quantities, such as the top mass and the strong coupling.