Aug 26 (Wed), 14:15 in A315
Spacetime curvature and the Higgs stability before and after inflation
The best fit values for the SM parameters imply that the potential for the Higgs boson developes a Planck-scale vacuum with negative energy, which may result in decay of the current vacuum state. In this talk we show the significance of backreaction from classical gravity for vacuum stability in the early universe. After introducing the topic of inflationary vacuum stability, we will concentrate on the non-perturbative effects during reheating and show that they may induce vacuum decay for large inflationary scales. In particular, we conclude that inflation and reheating constrain the non-minimal coupling between the SM Higgs and gravity to be close to 1/6. arXiv:1407.3141 and arXiv:1506.04065.