Can Inflation be Connected to Low Energy Particle Physics?
  It is an interesting question whether low energy degrees of freedom may be
responsible for early universe inflation. To examine this, here we present a
simple version of Higgs-inflation with minimal coupling to gravity and a
quadratic inflationary potential. This quantitatively differs from the popular
non-minimally coupled models, although it is qualitatively similar. In all such
models, new heavy fields must enter in order for the theory to be well behaved
in the UV. We show that in all cases the Higgs self coupling lambda must be
quite small in order to integrate out the heavy fields and use the resulting
low energy effective field theory of the Higgs to describe inflation. For
moderately sized lambda, the UV completion is required and will, in general,
determine the inflationary regime. We discuss the important issue of the
arbitrariness of the Lagrangians used in all these setups by presenting a new
class of such models, including a supergravity version. This suggests that the
inflationary potential is disconnected from low energy physics.
