We study whether the hinted 750 GeV resonance at the LHC can be a Coleman-Weinberg inflaton which is non-minimally coupled to gravity .
Since the inflaton must couple to new charged and coloured states to reproduce the LHC diphoton signature , the same interaction can generate its effective potential and trigger the electroweak symmetry breaking via the portal coupling to the Higgs boson .
This inflationary scenario predicts a lower bound on the tensor-to-scalar ratio of r \gtrsim 0.006 , where the minimal value corresponds to the measured spectral index n _ { s } \simeq 0.97 .
However , we find that the compatibility with the LHC diphoton signal requires exotic new physics at energy scales accessible at the LHC .
We study and quantify the properties of the predicted exotic particles .