(Higgs) vacuum decay during inflation
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
2017-07-17 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Theory
Abstract
We develop the formalism for computing gravitational corrections to vacuum decay from de Sitter space as a sub-Planckian perturbative expansion. Non-minimal coupling to gravity can be encoded in an effective potential. The Coleman bounce continuously deforms into the Hawking-Moss bounce, until they coincide for a critical value of the Hubble constant. As an application, we reconsider the decay of the electroweak Higgs vacuum during inflation. Our vacuum decay computation reproduces and improves bounds on the maximal inflationary Hubble scale previously computed through statistical techniques.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1706.00792,
title = {(Higgs) vacuum decay during inflation},
author = {Aris Joti and Aris Katsis and Dimitris Loupas and Alberto Salvio and Alessandro Strumia and Nikolaos Tetradis and Alfredo Urbano},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.00792},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
23 pages, 5 figures; references added, matches version published in JHEP