On the violent preheating in the mixed Higgs-$R^2$ inflationary model

Abstract: It has been argued that the mixed Higgs-$R^2$ model acts as the UV extension of the Higgs inflation, pushing up its cut-off scale in the vacuum close up to the Planck scale. In this letter, we study the inflaton oscillation stage after inflation, focusing on the effective mass of the phase direction of the Higgs field, which can cause a violent preheating process. We find that the "spikes" in the effective mass of the phase direction observed in the Higgs inflation still appear in the mixed Higgs-$R^2$ model. While the spikes appear above the cut-off scale in the Higgs-only case, they appear below the cut-off scale when the model is extended with $R^2$ term though reheating cannot be completed in the violent particle production regime since the spikes get milder.