Related papers: Electroweak Vacuum Metastability and Low-scale Inf…
We investigate the stability of the electroweak vacuum in metric-affine gravity in which the Standard Model Higgs boson can be non-minimally coupled to both the Ricci scalar and the Holst invariant. We find that vacuum stability is improved…
We investigate chaotic inflation models with two scalar fields, such that one field (the inflaton) rolls while the other is trapped in a false vacuum state. The false vacuum becomes unstable when the inflaton field falls below some critical…
We study the implications of a possible unstable particle with mass $M_X<$ TeV for the Higgs stability, naturalness and inflation. We pay particular attention to the case $M_X\approx$ 750 GeV, suggested by recent results of ATLAS and CMS on…
It is a longstanding desire of cosmologists, and particle physicists as well, to connect inflation to low energy physics, culminating, for instance, in what is known as Higgs inflation. The condition for the standard Higgs boson playing the…
New physics at the TeV scale or lower may destabilise the electroweak vacuum. How low could the vacuum instability scale be? This fundamental question may be tied to a deeper understanding of the Higgs potential and its associated hierarchy…
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…
We revisit the stability of the Standard Model vacuum, and investigate its quantum effective potential using the highest available orders in perturbation theory and the most accurate determination of input parameters to date. We observe…
The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC, and especially the determination of its mass around 125 GeV, together with the absence of any trace of new physics make it conceivable that we live in a metastable (but long-lived) electroweak…
Current data point toward metastability of the electroweak vacuum within the Standard Model. We study the possibility of stabilizing the Higgs potential in U(1) extensions thereof. A generic Z$'$ boson improves stability of the scalar…
The measurements of the Higgs boson and top quark masses can be used to extrapolate the Standard Model Higgs potential at energies up to the Planck scale. Adopting a NNLO renormalization procedure, we: i) find that electroweak vacuum…
We minimally extend the SM with a Z$_2$ symmetric potential containing a single scalar field, serving as our inflaton with a quartic self-coupling. In the model we have symmetry breaking in both sectors, and with the addition of an…
The dynamics of both the preinflationary and the preheating epochs for a model consisting of a Higgs inflaton plus an additional auxiliary field are studied in full General Relativity. The minimally coupled auxiliary field allows for…
The possibility that the Standard Model (SM) is valid up to the Planck scale $M_P$, i.e. that new physics occurs only around $M_P$, is nowadays largely explored. For a metastable EW vacuum, we show that new physics interactions can have a…
The Standard Model electroweak vacuum has been found to be metastable, with the true stable vacuum given by a large, phenomenologically unacceptable vacuum expectation value $\approx M_{P}$. Moreover, it may be unstable in an inflationary…
Cosmological implications of Higgs field fluctuations during inflation are considered. This study is based on the Standard Model and the standard quadratic model of chaotic inflation where the Higgs field is minimally coupled to gravity and…
We consider the extension of the Standard Model (SM) with a light inflaton where both unitarity problem in Higgs inflation and vacuum instability problem are resolved. The linear non-minimal coupling of the inflaton to gravity leads to a…
Estimates of the Higgs and top quark masses, $m_{H} \simeq 125.10 \pm 0.14$ [GeV] and $m_{t} \simeq 172.76 \pm 0.30$ [GeV] based on the experimental results place the Standard Model in the region of the metastable vacuum. A consequence of…
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…
We show how a heavy scalar singlet with a large vacuum expectation value can evade the potential instability of the Standard Model electroweak vacuum. The quartic interaction between the heavy scalar singlet and the Higgs doublet leads to a…
We discuss models where the Higgs boson of the electroweak standard model plays the role of the inflaton. We focus on the question of the violation of perturbative unitarity due to the coupling of the Higgs boson either to the Ricci scalar…