Higgs vacuum (in)stability during inflation. The dangerous relevance of De Sitter departure and Planck-suppressed operators

DOI10.1007/JHEP02(2020)142zbMATH Open1435.85010arXiv1910.13430OpenAlexW3099003324MaRDI QIDQ2188643FDOQ2188643

John W. Ronayne, Jacopo Fumagalli, Sébastien Renaux-Petel

Publication date: 11 June 2020

Published in: Journal of High Energy Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The measured Standard Model parameters lie in a range such that the Higgs potential, once extrapolated up to high scales, develops a minimum of negative energy density. This has important cosmological implications. In particular, during inflation, quantum fluctuations could have pushed the Higgs field beyond its potential barrier, triggering the formation of anti-de Sitter regions, with fatal consequences for our universe. By requiring that this did not happen, one can in principle connect (and constrain) Standard Model parameters with the energy scale of inflation. In this context, we highlight the sensitivity of the fate of our vacuum to seemingly irrelevant physics. In particular, the departure of inflation from an exact de Sitter phase, as well as Planck-suppressed derivative operators, can, already and surprisingly, play a decisive role in (de)stabilizing the Higgs during inflation. Furthermore, in the stochastic dynamics, we quantify the impact of the amplitude of the noise differing from the one of a massless field, as well as of going beyond the slow-roll approximation by using a phase-space approach. On a general ground, our analysis shows that relating the period of inflation to precision particle physics requires a knowledge of these "irrelevant" effects.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.13430

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zbMATH Keywords

stochastic processeseffective field theoriesHiggs physics

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Markov processes: estimation; hidden Markov models (62M05) Applications of statistics to physics (62P35) Gravitational interaction in quantum theory (81V17) Quantization of the gravitational field (83C45) Space-time singularities, cosmic censorship, etc. (83C75) Relativistic cosmology (83F05) Astrophysical cosmology (85A40) Bosonic systems in quantum theory (81V73)

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Cited In (23)

• Enhancing gravitational wave anisotropies with peaked scalar sources
• Matching and running sensitivity in non-renormalizable inflationary models
• Renormalization group equations of Higgs-\(R^2\) inflation
• Multifield inflation beyond N_field=2: non-Gaussianities and single-field effective theory
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• The effective Higgs potential and vacuum decay in Starobinsky inflation
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• Gravitational waves from a curvature-induced phase transition of a Higgs-portal dark matter sector
• Vacuum decay constraints on the Higgs curvature coupling from inflation
• UV freeze-in in Starobinsky inflation
• Accessibility measure for eternal inflation: dynamical criticality and higgs metastability

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