Search results for "ELECTROWEAK VACUUM"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
Do metric fluctuations affect the Higgs dynamics during inflation?
2017
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 fluctuations are suppressed by $\mathcal{O}(10^{-7})$. They are negligible compared to both pure Higgs terms in the effective potential and the unavoidable non-minimal Higgs coupling to background scalar curvature. The question of the electroweak vacuum instability during high energy scale inflation can therefore be studied consistently using the Jordan frame action in a Friedmann--Lema\^itre--Robertson--Walker metric, where the Higgs-curvature coupling …
Spacetime curvature and Higgs stability after inflation
2015
We investigate the dynamics of the Higgs field at the end of inflation in the minimal scenario consisting of an inflaton field coupled to the Standard Model only through the non-minimal gravitational coupling $\xi$ of the Higgs field. Such a coupling is required by renormalisation of the Standard Model in curved space, and in the current scenario also by vacuum stability during high-scale inflation. We find that for $\xi\gtrsim 1$, rapidly changing spacetime curvature at the end of inflation leads to significant production of Higgs particles, potentially triggering a transition to a negative-energy Planck scale vacuum state and causing an immediate collapse of the Universe.
The 1-loop effective potential for the Standard Model in curved spacetime
2018
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 independent of the choice of the vacuum state and allows the derivation of the complete set of $\beta$-functions. The potential depends on the spacetime curvature through the direct non-minimal Higgs-curvature coupling, curvature contributions to the loop diagrams, and through the curvature dependence of the renormalisation scale. Together, these lead to significant curvature dependence, which needs to be taken into account in cosmological applications, which i…
Early Universe Higgs dynamics in the presence of the Higgs-inflaton and non-minimal Higgs-gravity couplings
2017
Apparent metastability of the electroweak vacuum poses a number of cosmological questions. These concern evolution of the Higgs field to the current vacuum, and its stability during and after inflation. Higgs-inflaton and non-minimal Higgs-gravity interactions can make a crucial impact on these considerations potentially solving the problems. In this work, we allow for these couplings to be present simultaneously and study their interplay. We find that different combinations of the Higgs-inflaton and non-minimal Higgs-gravity couplings induce effective Higgs mass during and after inflation. This crucially affects the Higgs stability considerations during preheating. In particular, a wide ra…
Reheating the Standard Model from a hidden sector
2016
We consider a scenario where the inflaton decays to a hidden sector thermally decoupled from the visible Standard Model sector. A tiny portal coupling between the hidden and the visible sectors later heats the visible sector so that the Standard Model degrees of freedom come to dominate the energy density of the Universe before Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. We find that this scenario is viable, although obtaining the correct dark matter abundance and retaining successful Big Bang Nucleosynthesis is not obvious. We also show that the isocurvature perturbations constituted by a primordial Higgs condensate are not problematic for the viability of the scenario.
Observational signatures of Higgs inflation
2016
We investigate the dependency of Higgs inflation on the non-renormalisable matching between the low energy Standard Model limit and the inflationary regime at high energies. We show that for the top mass range $m_t \gtrsim 171.8$ GeV the scenario robustly predicts the spectral index $n_s \simeq 0.97$ and the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r\simeq 0.003$. The matching is however non-trivial, even the best-fit values $m_h=125.09$ GeV and $m_t=173.21$ GeV require a jump $\delta \lambda \sim 0.01$ in the Higgs coupling below the inflationary scale. For $m_t\lesssim 171.8$ GeV, the matching may generate a feature in the inflationary potential. In this case the predicted values of $n_s$ and $r$ vary but…