The Gravitational Wave Background and Higgs False Vacuum Inflation

Abstract

For a narrow band of values of the top quark and Higgs boson masses, the Standard Model Higgs potential develops a shallow local minimum at energies of about $10^{16}$ GeV, where primordial inflation could have started in a cold metastable state. For each point of that band, the highness of the Higgs potential at the false minimum is calculable, and there is an associated prediction for the inflationary gravitational wave background, namely for the tensor to scalar ratio $r$. We show that the recent measurement of $r$ by the BICEP2 collaboration, $r=0.16_{-0.05}^{+0.06}$ at $1\sigma$, combined with the most up-to-date measurements of the top quark and Higgs boson masses, reveals that the hypothesis that a Standard Model shallow false minimum was the source of inflation in the early Universe is viable.

4 pages, 2 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1112.5430

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• Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
• Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC
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• Modified Lyth bound and implications of BICEP2 results
• Chaotic inflation and unitarity problem
• Primordial gravitational waves amplification from causal fluids
• Higgs vacuum stability and inflationary dynamics after BICEP2 and PLANCK dust polarisation data
• Higgs Mass and Gravity Waves in Standard Model False Vacuum Inflation
• Stability of the EW vacuum, Higgs boson, and new physics
• Top-Goldstone coupling spoils renormalization of Higgs inflation