Living beyond the edge: Higgs inflation and vacuum metastability

Understand

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.