Scale Invariant Extension of the Standard Model: A Nightmare Scenario in Cosmology

Abstract: Inflationary observables of a classically scale invariant model, in which the origin of the Planck mass and the electroweak scale including the right-handed neutrino mass is chiral symmetry breaking in a QCD-like hidden sector, are studied. Despite a three-field inflation the initial-value-dependence is strongly suppressed thanks to a river-valley like potential. The model predicts the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ of cosmological perturbations smaller than that of the $R^2$ inflation, i.e., $ 0.0044 \gsim r \gsim 0.0017$ for e-foldings between $50$ and $60$: The model will be consistent even with a null detection at LiteBird/CMB-S4. We find that the non-Gaussianity parameter $f_{NL}$ is $O(10^{-2})$, the same size as that of single-field inflation. The dark matter particles are the lightest Nambu-Goldstone bosons associated with chiral symmetry breaking, which are decay products of one of the inflatons and are heavier than $10^9$ GeV with a strongly suppressed coupling with the standard model, implying that the dark matter will be unobservable in direct as well as indirect measurements.