Related papers: Electroweak Vacuum Stability in light of BICEP2
Measurements of the Higgs boson and top quark masses indicate that the Standard Model Higgs potential becomes unstable around $\Lambda_I \sim 10^{11}$ GeV. This instability is cosmologically relevant since quantum fluctuations during…
It has been claimed that the electroweak vacuum may be unstable during inflation due to large fluctuations of order $H$ in case of a high inflationary scale as suggested by BICEP2. We compute the Standard Model Higgs effective potential…
If the recent detection of $B-$mode polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background by BICEP2 observations, withstand the test of time after the release of recent PLANCK dust polarisation data, then it would surprisingly put the…
Recent analysis shows that if the 125-126 GeV LHC resonance turns out to be the Standard Model Higgs boson, the electroweak vacuum would be a metastable state at 98% C.L. In this paper we argue that, during inflation, the electroweak vacuum…
A remarkable prediction of the Standard Model is that, in the absence of corrections lifting the energy density, the Higgs potential becomes negative at large field values. If the Higgs field samples this part of the potential during…
Current measurements of the Higgs boson mass and top Yukawa coupling suggest that the effective Higgs potential develops an instability below the Planck scale. If the energy scale of inflation is as high as the GUT scale, inflationary…
We investigate inflationary Higgs dynamics and constraints on the Standard Model parameters assuming the Higgs potential, computed to next-to-next leading order precision, is not significantly affected by new physics. For a high…
We study the stability of the electroweak vacuum in low-scale inflation models whose Hubble parameter is much smaller than the instability scale of the Higgs potential. In general, couplings between the inflaton and Higgs are present, and…
In this work, we investigated the electroweak vacuum instability during or after inflation. In the inflationary Universe, i.e., de Sitter space, the vacuum field fluctuations $\left< {\delta \phi }^{ 2 } \right>$ enlarge in proportion to…
In this paper we investigate the vacuum stability of the non-minimally coupled Standard-Model Higgs during a phase of kinetic domination following the end of inflation. The non-minimal coupling to curvature stabilises the Higgs fluctuations…
The current experimentally measured parameters of the Standard Model (SM) suggest that our Universe lies in a metastable electroweak vacuum, where the Higgs field is prone to vacuum decay to a lower state with catastrophic consequences. Our…
In the Standard Model, the Higgs potential develops an instability at high field values when the quartic self-coupling runs negative. Large quantum fluctuations during cosmic inflation could drive the Higgs field beyond the potential…
If the Standard Model is valid up to very high energies it is known that the Higgs potential can develop a local minimum at field values around $10^{15}-10^{17}$ GeV, for a narrow band of values of the top quark and Higgs masses. We show…
The measured Standard Model parameters lie in a range such that the Higgs potential, once extrapolated up to high scales, develops a minimum of negative energy density. This has important cosmological implications. In particular, during…
Our electroweak vacuum may be metastable in light of the current experimental data of the Higgs/top quark mass. If this is really the case, high-scale inflation models require a stabilization mechanism of our vacuum during inflation. A…
In the standard model the (Brout-Englert-)Higgs quartic coupling becomes negative at high energies rendering our current electroweak vacuum metastable, but with an instability timescale much longer than the age of the Current Universe.…
We study the inflationary evolution of a scalar field $h$ with an unstable potential for the case where the Hubble parameter $H$ during inflation is larger than the instability scale $\Lambda_I$ of the potential. Quantum fluctuations in the…
We study the post-inflationary dynamics of the Standard Model (SM) Higgs field in the presence of a non-minimal coupling $\xi|\Phi|^2R$ to gravity, both with and without the electroweak gauge fields coupled to the Higgs. We assume a minimal…
If the Standard Model (SM) of elementary particle physics is assumed to hold good to arbitrarily high energies, then, for the best fit values of the parameters, the scalar potential of the Standard Model Higgs field turns negative at a high…
Within the Standard Model, the current Higgs and top quark data favor metastability of the electroweak vacuum, although the uncertainties are still significant. The true vacuum is many orders of magnitude deeper than ours and the barrier…