(Higgs) vacuum decay during inflation

Abstract

We develop the formalism for computing gravitational corrections to vacuum decay from de Sitter space as a sub-Planckian perturbative expansion. Non-minimal coupling to gravity can be encoded in an effective potential. The Coleman bounce continuously deforms into the Hawking-Moss bounce, until they coincide for a critical value of the Hubble constant. As an application, we reconsider the decay of the electroweak Higgs vacuum during inflation. Our vacuum decay computation reproduces and improves bounds on the maximal inflationary Hubble scale previously computed through statistical techniques.

23 pages, 5 figures; references added, matches version published in JHEP

References in corpus (12)

• Cosmological implications of the Higgs mass measurement
• Spacetime curvature and the Higgs stability during inflation
• Gravitational corrections to Standard Model vacuum decay
• Electroweak Vacuum Stability in light of BICEP2
• Higgs Dynamics during Inflation
• Probable or Improbable Universe? Correlating Electroweak Vacuum Instability with the Scale of Inflation
• On gravitational and thermal corrections to vacuum decay
• Inflationary cosmology and the standard model Higgs with a small Hubble induced mass
• Spacetime Dynamics of a Higgs Vacuum Instability During Inflation
• The Higgs vacuum is unstable
• The impact of non-minimally coupled gravity on vacuum stability
• Oscillating Fubini instantons in curved space

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Resurrecting Quadratic Inflation with a non-minimal coupling to gravity
• False Vacuum Decay Catalyzed by Black Holes
• Standard Model vacuum decay in a de Sitter Background
• Electroweak Vacuum Metastability and Low-scale Inflation
• Do metric fluctuations affect the Higgs dynamics during inflation?
• Renormalization group flows and fixed points for a scalar field in curved space with nonminimal $F(\varphi )R$ coupling