Rights statement: © 2019 American Physical Society
Accepted author manuscript, 326 KB, PDF document
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Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
| Article number | 063518 |
|---|---|
| <mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 15/03/2019 |
| <mark>Journal</mark> | Physical Review D |
| Issue number | 6 |
| Volume | 99 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Publication Status | Published |
| <mark>Original language</mark> | English |
Current cosmological models require the universe to be in a very smooth initial state before the onset of inflation, a situation to which Penrose ascribes a vanishingly small probability, leading to his proposal of a conformal cyclic cosmology. We present an alternative paradigm, in which the Higgs plays the role of dilaton and resolves this problem by weakening gravity at very early times, thus providing a form of inflation that is compatible with observations and in which the inflaton is solidly related to tested particle physics.