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Spacetime Curvature and the Higgs Stability During Inflation

M. Herranen, T. Markkanen, S. Nurmi, and A. Rajantie
Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 211102 – Published 17 November 2014

Abstract

It has been claimed that the electroweak vacuum may be unstable during inflation due to large fluctuations of the order H 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 ξ, which either stabilizes the potential against fluctuations for ξEW6×102, or destabilizes it for ξEW2×102 when the generated curvature mass is negative. Only in the narrow intermediate region may the effect of the curvature mass be significantly smaller.

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  • Received 4 September 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.211102

© 2014 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

M. Herranen1,*, T. Markkanen2,†, S. Nurmi2,‡, and A. Rajantie3,§

  • 1Niels Bohr International Academy and Discovery Center, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Blegdamsvej 17, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
  • 2Helsinki Institute of Physics and Department of Physics, P. O. Box 64, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
  • 3Theoretical Physics, Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom

  • *herranen@nbi.ku.dk
  • tommi.markkanen@helsinki.fi
  • sami.nurmi@helsinki.fi
  • §a.rajantie@imperial.ac.uk

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Issue

Vol. 113, Iss. 21 — 21 November 2014

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