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...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2021-11
Main Author: Mantziris, Andreas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronomical models
Cosmology
Coupling
Electroweak model
Inflation (cosmology)
Time dependence
Universe
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
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 \(\xi\). 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 \(\xi\)-bounds from quadratic and quartic chaotic inflation, and Starobinsky-like power-law inflation.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2111.02497