Vacuum Stability in the Early Universe and the Backreaction of Classical Gravity

Understand

In the case of a metastable electroweak vacuum the quantum corrected effective potential plays a crucial role in the potential instability of the Standard Model.

• In the Early Universe, in particular during inflation and reheating, this instability can be triggered leading to catastrophic vacuum decay.
• We discuss how the large spacetime curvature of the Early Universe can be incorporated in the calculation and in many cases significantly modify the flat space prediction.
• The two key new elements are the unavoidable generation of the non-minimal coupling between the Higgs field and the scalar curvature of gravity and a curvature induced contribution to the running of the constants.