Abstract
The measurements of the Higgs mass and top Yukawa coupling indicate that we live in a very special Universe, at the edge of the absolute stability of the electroweak vacuum. If fully stable, the Standard Model (SM) can be extended all the way up to the inflationary scale and the Higgs field, non-minimally coupled to gravity with strength $\xi$, can be responsible for inflation. We show that the successful Higgs inflation scenario can also take place if the SM vacuum is not absolutely stable. This conclusion is based on two effects that were overlooked previously. The first one is associated with the effective renormalization of the SM couplings at the energy scale $M_P/\xi$, where $M_P$ is the Planck scale. The second one is a symmetry restoration after inflation due to high temperature effects that leads to the (temporary) disappearance of the vacuum at Planck values of the Higgs field.
Highlights
One of the most interesting questions in particle physics and cosmology is the relation between the properties of elementary particles and the structure of the Universe
The present experimental data are perfectly consistent with the absolute stability of Standard Model within the experimental and theoretical uncertainties, one should not exclude the possibility that other experiments will be able to establish the metastability of the electroweak vacuum in the future
Should the Higgs inflation idea be abandoned in this case? This paper gives a negative answer to this question
Summary
The behavior of the Higgs self-coupling λ is quite peculiar: it decreases with energy to eventually arrive at a minimum at Planck scale values and starts increasing thereafter, see Fig. 1. [6], shows the borderline between the regions of absolute stability and metastability of the SM vacuum on the plane of the Higgs boson mass and top quark Yukawa coupling in the MS scheme taken at μ 1⁄4 173.2 GeV. Sketch of the effective Higgs inflation potential for the scenario considered in this paper It contains an inflationary plateau at χ ≳ MP and two minima.
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