Electroweak vacuum (in)stability in an inflationary universe
By A. Kobakhidze, A. Spencer-Smith. 2013
140 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Recent analysis shows that if the 125–126 GeV LHC resonance turns out to be the Standard Model Higgs boson, the electroweak vacuum would be a metastable state at 98% C.L. In this Letter we argue that, during inflation, the electroweak vacuum can actually be very short-lived, contrary to the conclusion that follows from the flat spacetime analysis. Namely, in the case of a pure Higgs potential the electroweak vacuum decays via the Hawking–Moss transition, which has no flat spacetime analogue. As a result, the Higgs vacuum is unstable, unless the rate of inflation is low enough: H inf ≲ 10 9 – 10 12 GeV . Models of inflation with such a low rate typically predict negligible tensor perturbations in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). This is also true for models in which the perturbations are produced by a curvaton field. We also find that if the effective curvature of the Higgs potential at a local maximum (which may be induced by inflaton-Higgs interactions) is large enough, then the decay of the electroweak vacuum is dominated by the Coleman–de Luccia transition. The electroweak vacuum is also short-lived in this case, due to a negative effective self-interaction coupling. Based on our analysis of Higgs vacuum stability during inflation, we conclude that the observation of tensor perturbations by the Planck satellite would provide strong indirect evidence for new physics beyond the Standard Model responsible for stabilisation of the electroweak vacuum.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73794ad58bf290f3abbde6502d593f33d941b764
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Alessandro Strumia
- G. Giudice
- A. Salvio
- J. Espinosa
- L. Senatore
- A. Riotto
- Andrei Linde
- Giuseppe Degrassi
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
- Alessandro Strumia
- G. Giudice
- A. Salvio
- J. Espinosa
- A. Riotto
- L. Senatore
- Giuseppe Degrassi
- Pier Paolo Giardino
Citations in the corpus
- Investigating the near-criticality of the Higgs boson (2013, background): “The discovery of the SM near-criticality has led to many theoretical speculations [8, 31–55, 120, 121].”
- Inflationary paradigm after Planck 2013 (2013, background): “For the Higgs field to remain in the region within the potential maxima during inflation, there are constraints on various inflationary parameters, derived in references cited by ISL [51,54], that must be obeyed.”
- The cosmological Higgstory of the vacuum instability (2015, background): “about electroweak-vacuum decay from thermal or inflationary Higgs fluctuations have already been studied in the literature [14–24], but here we give a comprehensive description of the phenomenon and reach new conclusions.”