title: Spacetime curvature and the Higgs stability during inflation.
abstract: It has been claimed that the electroweak vacuum may be unstable during inflation due to large fluctuations of the order H in the case of a high inflationary scale as suggested by BICEP2. We compute the standard model Higgs effective potential including UV-induced curvature corrections at one-loop level. We find that for a high inflationary scale a large curvature mass is generated due to renormalization group running of nonminimal coupling ξ, which either stabilizes the potential against fluctuations for ξEW≳6×10(-2), or destabilizes it for ξEW≲2×10(-2) when the generated curvature mass is negative. Only in the narrow intermediate region may the effect of the curvature mass be significantly smaller.
authors.affiliation: Niels Bohr International Academy and Discovery Center, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Blegdamsvej 17, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Herranen
authors.affiliation: Helsinki Institute of Physics and Department of Physics, P. O. Box 64, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Markkanen
authors.affiliation: Helsinki Institute of Physics and Department of Physics, P. O. Box 64, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nurmi
authors.affiliation: Theoretical Physics, Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rajantie