Spacetime curvature and the Higgs stability during inflation

Abstract

It has been claimed that the electroweak vacuum may be unstable during inflation due to large fluctuations of order $H$ in case of a high inflationary scale as suggested by BICEP2. We compute the Standard Model Higgs effective potential including UV-induced curvature corrections at one-loop level. We find that for a high inflationary scale a large curvature mass is generated due to RG running of non-minimal coupling $\xi$, which either stabilizes the potential against fluctuations for ${\xi }_{\mathrm{EW}}\gtrsim 6\cdot 10^{-2}$, or destabilizes it for ${\xi }_{\mathrm{EW}}\lesssim 2\cdot 10^{-2}$ when the generated curvature mass is negative. Only in the narrow intermediate region the effect of the curvature mass may be significantly smaller.

5 pages, 4 figures. Version published in PRL

References in corpus (5)

• The Standard Model Higgs boson as the inflaton
• Cosmological implications of the Higgs mass measurement
• Electroweak Vacuum Stability in light of BICEP2
• Higgs Dynamics during Inflation
• Remarks about the Tensor Mode Detection by the BICEP2 Collaboration and the Super-Planckian Excursions of the Inflaton Field

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