(Higgs) vacuum decay during inflation

Understand

We develop the formalism for computing gravitational corrections to vacuum decay from de Sitter space as a sub-Planckian perturbative expansion.

• Non-minimal coupling to gravity can be encoded in an effective potential.
• The Coleman bounce continuously deforms into the Hawking-Moss bounce, until they coincide for a critical value of the Hubble constant.
• As an application, we reconsider the decay of the electroweak Higgs vacuum during inflation.