Early Universe Higgs dynamics in the presence of the Higgs-inflaton and non-minimal Higgs-gravity couplings

Abstract

Abstract. Apparent metastability of the electroweak vacuum poses a number of cosmological questions. These concern evolution of the Higgs field to the current vacuum, and its stability during and after inflation. Higgs-inflaton and non-minimal Higgs-gravity interactions can make a crucial impact on these considerations potentially solving the problems. In this work, we allow for these couplings to be present simultaneously and study their interplay. We find that different combinations of the Higgs-inflaton and non-minimal Higgs-gravity couplings induce effective Higgs mass during and after inflation. This crucially affects the Higgs stability considerations during preheating. In particular, a wide range of the couplings leading to stable solutions becomes allowed.

(Higgs) vacuum decay during inflation

“…Defining V H (h) = V 0 + δV H (h), in the limit δV (h max ) V 0 and at leading order in κ this formula simplifies to 22) where H can be evaluated at h = 0. We shall examine the role of the Hawking-Moss solution for vacuum decay, finding that it is relevant for large values of H. Generically, there are also non-trivial solutions with a non-constant Higgs profile h(r), which, in the flat-space limit, reduce to the Coleman bounce [1].…”

“…The Higgs field can fluctuate towards values a few orders of magnitude below the Planck scale, for which its potential can be deeper than for the electroweak vacuum [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. If vacuum decay happens during inflation, the regions of true vacuum expand and engulf the whole space [2,18,24].…”

The inflaton portal to dark matter

“…Attempts to incorporate inflation within a context of low scale supersymmetry breaking [44] has however shown that a complete description of low energy phenomenology of an inflation model can lead to rich constraints relating primordial cosmology to LHC physics. Furthermore interactions of the inflaton with the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson has been shown to be able to solve the question of the stability of the electroweak vacuum [45][46][47]. However the question of the role played by the inflaton as a mediator in the dark matter production mechanism has never been explored so far.…”

“…The coupling of such term would thus have to be fine-tuned to avoid such constraint, thus we ignored it in our analysis, although it could have interesting phenomenology at the time of the reheating, as pointed out in [45][46][47].…”

On the catalysis of the electroweak vacuum decay by black holes at high temperature

“…This issue is crucial for the decay of the electroweak vacuum, because of the extreme sensitivity of the Higgs potential to the Higgs and top masses [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. The fact that the a e-mail: ntetrad@phys.uoa.gr gravitational effects are significant during inflation has led to an extensive investigation of the stability of the electroweak vacuum during this era, leading to bounds on the inflationary scale [14,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] in order to avoid a catastrophic singularity characterized as the AdS crunch [1,31,36].…”