Related papers: Higgs relaxation after inflation
We introduce and discuss two inter-related mechanisms operative in the electroweak sector of the Standard Model at high energies. Higgsplosion, the first mechanism, occurs at some critical energy in the 25 to 10^3 TeV range, and leads to an…
The Standard Model Higgs boson, which has previously been shown to develop an effective vacuum expectation value during inflation, can give rise to large particle masses during inflation and reheating, leading to temporary blocking of the…
Recent measurements at the LHC suggest that the current Higgs vacuum could be metastable with a modest barrier (height 10^{10-12}{GeV})^{4}) separating it from a ground state with negative vacuum density of order the Planck scale. We note…
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…
The dark axion portal is a coupling of an axion-like particle to a dark photon kinetically mixed with the visible photon. We show how this portal, when applied to the relaxion, can lead to cosmological relaxation of the weak scale using…
In the absence of new physics around $10^{10}$ GeV, the electroweak vacuum is at best metastable. This represents a major challenge for high scale inflationary models as, during the early rapid expansion of the universe, it seems difficult…
The analysis of theories with non-minimal coupling of Higgs field to gravity revealed that they enter into strong coupling regime above certain Higgs-dependent cutoff, which may be considerably below the Planck scale. Assuming that the…
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.…
A new relaxion mechanism is proposed where a small electroweak scale is preferably selected earlier than the larger one due to a potential instability, which is different from previously proposed stopping mechanisms by either Hubble…
We propose that inflation is driven by a (complex) neutral Higgs of the MSSM extension of the SM, in a chaotic-like inflation setting. The SUSY breaking soft term masses are of order $10^{12}-10^{13}$ GeV, which is identified with the…
In this work, we revisit the non-minimally coupled Higgs Inflation scenario and investigate its observational viability in light of the current Cosmic Microwave Background, Baryon Acoustic Oscillation and type Ia Supernovae data. We explore…
A version of the Standard Model is considered, where the electroweak symmetry breaking is provided by cosmological initial data given for the zeroth Fourier harmonic of the Higgs field $<\phi>$. The initial data symmetry breaking mechanism…
We explore a minimal scenario where the sole Standard-Model Higgs is responsible for reheating the Universe after inflation, produces a significant background of gravitational waves and maintains the full classical stability of the…
Extending previous results [JHEP 11 (2021) 091], we explore aspects of the reheating mechanism for non-minimal Higgs inflation in the strong coupling regime. We constrain the radiative corrections for the inflaton's potential by considering…
The abundance of the QCD axion is known to be suppressed if the Hubble parameter during inflation, $H_{\rm inf}$, is lower than the QCD scale, and if the inflation lasts sufficiently long. We show that the tight upper bound on the inflation…
We study the possibility of relaxing the cosmological bound on the Higgs mass coming from the requirement of non-erasure of the baryon asymmetry by sphalerons. After reviewing the Standard Model case we obtain this bound in two extensions…
The measured values of the Higgs and top quark masses imply that the Standard Model potential is very likely to be unstable at large Higgs values. This is particularly problematic during inflation, which sources large perturbations of the…
Models of Gauge-Higgs unification in extra dimensions offer a very elegant playground where one can study electroweak symmetry breaking. The nicest feature is that gauge symmetry itself protects the Higgs potential from divergences, thus…
We argue that the SM in the Higgs phase does not suffer form a "hierarchy problem" and that similarly the "cosmological constant problem" resolves itself if we understand the SM as a low energy effective theory emerging from a cut-off…
We introduce a new method that allows for the Higgs to be the inflaton. That is, we let the Higgs be a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone (pNG) boson of a global coset symmetry $G/H$ that spontaneously breaks at an energy scale $\sim 4\pi f$ and give…