Related papers: Spacetime curvature and the Higgs stability during…
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…
We update instability and metastability bounds of the Standard Model electroweak vacuum in view of the recent ATLAS and CMS Higgs results. For a Higgs mass in the range 124--126 GeV, and for the current central values of the top mass and…
We refine and update the metastability constraint on the Standard Model top and Higgs masses, by analytically including gravitational corrections to the vacuum decay rate. Present best-fit ranges of the top and Higgs masses mostly lie in…
Current cosmological data favour inflationary models non-minimally coupled to gravity. In this work we study the implications of the metastability of the electroweak vacuum in this framework. We consider an inflaton field with a non-minimal…
Dynamical scanning of the Higgs mass by an axion-like particle during inflation may provide a cosmological component to explaining part of the hierarchy problem. We propose a novel interplay of this cosmological relaxation mechanism with…
The measurement of the Higgs mass at the LHC has confirmed that the Standard Model electroweak vacuum is a shallow local minimum and is not absolutely stable. In addition to a probable unacceptably fast tunneling to the deep true minimum,…
We study the stability of the electroweak vacuum during and after the Starobinsky inflation, assuming the existence of the non-minimal Higgs coupling to the Ricci scalar. In the Starobinsky inflation, there exists $R^2$ term (with $R$ being…
We present an effective model where the inflaton is a relaxion that scans the Higgs mass and sets it at the weak scale. The dynamics consist of a long epoch in which inflation is due to the shallow slope of the potential, followed by a few…
Experimental data suggest that the Higgs potential has a lower ground state at high field values. Consequently, decaying from the electroweak to the true vacuum nucleates bubbles that expand rapidly and can have dire consequences for our…
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…
Extrapolating the Standard Model Higgs potential at high energies, we study the barrier between the electroweak and Planck scale minima. The barrier arises by taking the central values of the relevant experimental inputs, that is the strong…
Using a physical renormalisation scheme we derive mass-dependent renormalisation group equations for the running of the Higgs quartic coupling within the Standard Model. Subsequently, we accurately take into account weak scale thresholds,…
For a narrow band of values of the top quark and Higgs boson masses, the Standard Model Higgs potential develops a shallow local minimum at energies of about $10^{16}$ GeV, where primordial inflation could have started in a cold metastable…
We show that the mechanism of cosmological relaxation of the electroweak scale can take place independently of the inflation mechanism, thus relieving burdens from the original relaxion proposal. What eventually stops the (fast-rolling)…
We revisit the compatibility between the chaotic inflation, which provides a natural solution to the initial condition problem, and the metastable electroweak vacuum, which is suggested by the results of LHC and the current mass…
The measured (central) values of the Higgs and top quark masses indicate that the Standard Model (SM) effective potential develops an instability at high field values. The scale of this instability, determined as the Higgs field value at…
We generalize the scalar-curvature coupling model ${\xi \Phi^2 R}$ of Higgs inflation to $ {\xi \Phi^a R^b} $ to study inflation. We compute the amplitude and spectral index of curvature perturbations generated during inflation and fix the…
The renormalisation group improved Standard Model effective potential in an arbitrary curved spacetime is computed to one loop order in perturbation theory. The loop corrections are computed in the ultraviolet limit, which makes them…
In the Standard Model (SM), the Higgs mass around 125 GeV implies that the electroweak vacuum is metastable since the quartic Higgs coupling turns negative at high energies. I point out that a tiny mixing of the Higgs with a heavy singlet…
We assume the validity of the Standard Model up to an arbitrary high-energy scale and discuss what information on the early stages of the Universe can be extracted from a measurement of the Higgs mass. For Mh < 130 GeV, the Higgs potential…