Fate of Electroweak Vacuum during Preheating

Understand

Our electroweak vacuum may be metastable in light of the current experimental data of the Higgs/top quark mass.

• If this is really the case, high-scale inflation models require a stabilization mechanism of our vacuum during inflation.
• A possible candidate is the Higgs-inflaton/-curvature coupling because it induces an additional mass term to the Higgs during the slow roll regime.
• However, after the inflation, the additional mass term oscillates, and it can potentially destabilize our electroweak vacuum via production of large Higgs fluctuations during the inflaton oscillation era.