Instability of the electroweak vacuum in Starobinsky inflation

Li, Qiang; Moroi, Takeo; Nakayama, Kazunori; Yin, Wen

doi:10.1007/jhep09(2022)102

Cited by 4 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 66 publications

(117 reference statements)

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“…This result is in numerical agreement with ref. [72] which studied the same question recently, by considering only classical evolution rather than Hawking-Moss transitions. That calculation also does not include curvature corrections to the effective potential, apart from the tree-level non-minimal coupling term.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This parameter is required by renormalizability of JCAP10(2022)073 the theory in curved spacetime [68][69][70], but it is practically impossible to measure its value experimentally in the current almost flat Universe. In contrast, vacuum stability during inflation [14,27,32,71] and after inflation [40,47,72] requires it to lie within a narrow range around the conformal value ξ = 1/6. For recent work on other cosmological implications of non-minimal couplings see the refs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…[71]. These terms have been investigated in the setting of mixed Higgs-Starobinsky inflation [78][79][80], and recently also to study vacuum stability during reheating in Starobinsky inflation [72].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The effective Higgs potential and vacuum decay in Starobinsky inflation

Mantziris

Markkanen

Rajantie

2022

J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys.

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Based on the current experimental data, the Standard Model predicts that the current vacuum state of the Universe is metastable, leading to a non-zero rate of vacuum decay through nucleation of bubbles of true vacuum. Our existence implies that there cannot have been any such bubble nucleation events anywhere in our whole past lightcone. We consider a minimal scenario of the Standard Model together with Starobinsky inflation, using three-loop renormalization group improved Higgs effective potential with one-loop curvature corrections. We show that the survival of the vacuum state through inflation places a lower bound ξ ≳ 0.1 on the non-minimal Higgs curvature coupling, the last unknown parameter of the Standard Model. This bound is significantly stronger than in single field inflation models with no Higgs-inflaton coupling. It is also sensitive to the details of the dynamics at the end of inflation, and therefore it can be improved with a more detailed study of that period.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The effective Higgs potential and vacuum decay in Starobinsky inflation

Mantziris

Markkanen

Rajantie

2022

J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys.

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“…The novelty of our approach lies in the fact that we went beyond the dS description of the inflationary spacetime when calculating the relevant cosmological quantities, and we took into account the time dependence of the Hubble rate instead of setting it as a constant free parameter. In addition, we extended the range of similar studies [22,23], by improving also the calculation of the effective potential to 3-loops, with curvature corrections in dS to 1-loop, and a robust RGI prescription.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ending inflation with a bang: Higgs vacuum decay in $R^2$ gravity

Mantziris¹

2022

Proceedings of 41st International Conference on High Energy Physics — PoS(ICHEP2022)

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According to the current experimental data, the Higgs vacuum appears to be metastable due to the development of a second lower ground state in its potential. Consequently, vacuum decay would induce the nucleation of true vacuum bubbles with catastrophic consequences for our Universe and therefore we are motivated to study possible stabilising mechanisms in the early universe. In our latest investigation (2207.00696), we studied the electroweak metastability in the context of the observationally favoured model of Starobinsky inflation. Following the motivation and techniques from our first study (2011.037633), we obtained constraints on the Higgs curvature coupling ξ, while embedding the SM on the modified gravity scenario R + R 2 , which introduces Starobinsky inflation naturally. This had significant repercussions for the effective Higgs potential in the form of additional negative terms that destabilize the false vacuum. Another important aspect lay in the definition for the end of inflation, as bubble nucleation is most prominent during its very last moments. Our results dictated that these stronger lower ξ-bounds are very sensitive to the final moments of inflation, where spacetime deviates increasingly from de Sitter.

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“…The simulations are performed with the numerical tool CosmoLattice [33][34][35] customized to account for the nonminimal coupling to gravity. 3 Related particle production simulations in somewhat different regimes have been performed in [28,36] and in [37,38] with regard to the Higgs boson production.…”

Section: End Of Resonancementioning

confidence: 99%

Dark matter production via a non-minimal coupling to gravity

Lebedev

Solomko

Yoon

2023

J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys.

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We study postinflationary scalar dark matter production via its non-minimal coupling to gravity. During the inflaton oscillation epoch, dark matter is produced resonantly for a sufficiently large non-minimal coupling ξ ≳ 5. We find that backreaction on the curvature and rescattering effects typically become important for the values of ξ above 30, which invalidate simple estimates of the production efficiency. At large couplings, the dark matter yield becomes almost independent of ξ, signifying approximate quasi-equilibrium in the inflaton-dark matter system. Although the analysis gets complicated by the presence of apparent negative energy in the Jordan frame, this behaviour can be regularized by introducing mild dark matter self-interaction. Using lattice simulations, we delineate parameter space leading to the correct dark matter relic abundance.

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Instability of the electroweak vacuum in Starobinsky inflation

Cited by 4 publications

References 66 publications

The effective Higgs potential and vacuum decay in Starobinsky inflation

The effective Higgs potential and vacuum decay in Starobinsky inflation

Ending inflation with a bang: Higgs vacuum decay in $R^2$ gravity

Dark matter production via a non-minimal coupling to gravity

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