by Dr Tommi Markkanen
(Imperial College)
Since the parameters of the standard model (SM) are now known experimentally we are able to study the behavior of the electroweak potential also at extremely high energy scales. This is of crucial importance as instabilities in the potential could be a sign that physics beyond the SM is needed for stabilizing the vacuum. This is especially important during cosmological inflation as inflation induces fluctuations to the Higgs field potentially destabilizing the vacuum. In this talk I review the derivation of the SM Higgs effective potential and discuss its implications during inflation, hopefully in manner accessible to a broad audience. In particular I will show that generally a large curvature mass is generated which can stabilize the potential against fluctuations."