Seminarium Teorii Oddziaływań Elementarnych

I will begin this talk by motivating curvaton models and the idea of minimal models of cosmology. I will then introduce the minimal curvaton-higgs (MCH) model, which is a minimal interpretation of the curvaton scenario with one real scalar coupled to the standard model Higgs boson. The standard model coupling allows the dynamics of the model to be determined in detail, including effects from the thermal background and from radiative corrections to the potential. I'll discuss thermal blocking of the curvaton decay, including preliminary results from lattice simulations. Next I will present the parameter space and predictions of the model. Finally I will discuss an attempt to quantify the 'naturalness' of the model by considering stochastic dynamics.