Abstract
It has been claimed that the electroweak vacuum may be unstable during inflation due to large fluctuations of the order in the 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 renormalization group running of nonminimal coupling , which either stabilizes the potential against fluctuations for , or destabilizes it for when the generated curvature mass is negative. Only in the narrow intermediate region may the effect of the curvature mass be significantly smaller.
- Received 4 September 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.211102
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