English

Do metric fluctuations affect the Higgs dynamics during inflation?

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2017-12-27 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We show that the dynamics of the Higgs field during inflation is not affected by metric fluctuations if the Higgs is an energetically subdominant light spectator. For Standard Model parameters we find that couplings between Higgs and metric fluctuations are suppressed by O(107)\mathcal{O}(10^{-7}). They are negligible compared to both pure Higgs terms in the effective potential and the unavoidable non-minimal Higgs coupling to background scalar curvature. The question of the electroweak vacuum instability during high energy scale inflation can therefore be studied consistently using the Jordan frame action in a Friedmann--Lema\^itre--Robertson--Walker metric, where the Higgs-curvature coupling enters as an effective mass contribution. Similar results apply for other light spectator scalar fields during inflation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1707.00866,
  title  = {Do metric fluctuations affect the Higgs dynamics during inflation?},
  author = {Tommi Markkanen and Sami Nurmi and Arttu Rajantie},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.00866},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

v1: 13 pages. v2: some improvements, additional references, accepted for publication by JCAP

R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:37:15.906Z