  We investigate a locally scale-invariant (that is, Weyl-invariant) theory
which describes the coupling of gravity and the standard model from the
viewpont of the Higgs mechanism and inflation. It is shown that this theory
exhibits a peculiar feature of a coupling between the gauge field and the
inflaton in a large field limit whereas it nicely describes the standard model
coupled to general relativity in a small field limit. Moreover, we discuss a
possibility that this Weyl invariant theory could explain the recent BICEP2
measurement by deforming the potential term in an appropriate way, and find it
to be difficult to do that even if we introduce a non-analytical type of the
potential.
