"How does the Higgs potential survive inflation?"
Prof. Subhendra Mohanty,
Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, India
After the discovery of the 125 GeV mass Higgs, it was shown that
the value of the Higgs quartic coupling becomes negative on renormalization
at high energies. The energy scale at which the Higgs potential becomes
unstable is 10^(11) GeV. During inflation quantum fluctuations will drive
the vev of the Higgs field to $< \phi^2 > ~ H^2, where H the expansion rate
of the scale factor at the time of inflation is expected to be 10^{14} GeV.
Therefore during inflation the Higgs field will roll down to large negative
values. This inconsistency between Higgs potential and inflation even when
the Higgs field is not the inflation is an open problem. I will discuss ways
on which this problem has been solved by introducing new physics beyond the
standard model. I will also discuss one solution where the solution to the
Higgs instability problem is provided by quantum gravity in the form of the
Hawking-Gibbons temperature of the de-Sitter space during inflation.