Primordial non-Gaussianity from the Effects of the Standard Model Higgs
  during Reheating after Inflation
  We propose a new way of studying the Higgs potential at extremely high
energies. The SM Higgs boson, as a light spectator field during inflation in
the early Universe, can acquire large field values from its quantum
fluctuations which vary among different causal (Hubble) patches. Such a space
dependence of the Higgs after the end of inflation leads to space-dependent SM
particle masses and hence variable efficiency of reheating, when the inflaton
decays to Higgsed SM particles. Inhomogeneous reheating results in (observable)
temperature anisotropies. Further, the resulting temperature anisotropy
spectrum acquires a significant non-Gaussian component, which is constrained by
$\textit{Planck}$ observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and
potentially detectable in next-generation experiments. Constraints on this
non-Gaussian signal largely exlcude the possibility of the observed temperature
anisotropies arising primarily from Higgs effects. Hence, in principle,
observational searches for non-Gaussianity in the CMB can be used to constrain
the dynamics of the Higgs boson at very high (inflationary) energies.
