Abstract
The Standard Model (SM) possesses an instability at high scales that would be catastrophic during or just after inflation, and yet no new physics has been seen to alter this. Furthermore, modern developments in quantum gravity suggest that the SM degrees of freedom are not unique; that a typical low energy effective theory should include a large assortment of hidden sector degrees of freedom. It is therefore puzzling that cosmological constraints from BBN and CMB reveal that the early universe was almost entirely dominated by the SM, when the inflaton ϕ could have decayed into many sectors. In this work we propose the following explanation for all of this: we allow the lowest dimension operators with natural coefficients between the inflaton and both the Higgs and hidden sectors. Such hidden sectors are assumed to be entirely natural; this means all unprotected masses are pushed up to high scales and project out of the spectrum, while only massless (or protected) degrees of freedom remain, and so the inflaton can only reheat these sectors through higher dimension (and suppressed) operators. On the other hand, the SM possesses a special feature: it includes a light Higgs H, presumably for life to exist, and hence it allows a super-renormalizable coupling to the inflaton ϕ H† H, which allows rapid decay into the SM . We show that this naturally (i) removes the instability in the Higgs potential both during and after inflation due to a tree-level effect that increases the value of the Higgs self-coupling from the IR to the UV when one passes the inflaton mass, (ii) explains why the SM is dominant in the early universe, and in particular we compute the relative temperature and abundances of the sectors, (iii) allows dark matter to form in hidden sector/s through subsequent strong dynamics (or axions, etc), (iv) allows for high reheating and possibly baryogenesis, and (v) accounts for why there so far has been no direct detection of dark matter or new physics beyond the SM.