On the cosmological implications of the electroweak vacuum instability: constraining the non-minimal coupling with inflation

Our current measurements of the Standard Model parameters imply that the Higgs field resides in a metastable electroweak vacuum, where the vacuum can decay to a lower ground state, with cataclysmic repercussions for our Universe. According to our observations, no such event has happened in the obser...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of physics. Conference series 2021-12, Vol.2156 (1), p.12239
Main Author: Mantziris, Andreas
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:Our current measurements of the Standard Model parameters imply that the Higgs field resides in a metastable electroweak vacuum, where the vacuum can decay to a lower ground state, with cataclysmic repercussions for our Universe. According to our observations, no such event has happened in the observable universe, in spite of the various energetic processes that could have triggered it. This work serves as an overview of a method that uses the metastability of the false vacuum during cosmological inflation to provide constraints on the Higgs curvature coupling ξ. Considering also the effects of the time-dependent Hubble rate on the effective Higgs potential and on our past light-cone space-time geometry, results in state-of-the-art lower ξ-bounds from quadratic and quartic chaotic inflation, and Starobinsky-like power-law inflation.
ISSN:1742-6588
1742-6596
DOI:10.1088/1742-6596/2156/1/012239