Speaker
Description
The Standard Model Higgs field, when non-minimally coupled to gravity, can display rich dynamics after inflation. In cosmological setups that include a short kination stage, the fast variation of spacetime curvature can temporarily destabilize the electroweak vacuum through curvature-induced tachyonic effects. This process can trigger a gravitationally sourced phase transition, leading to the rapid growth of Higgs fluctuations, the development of transient inhomogeneous configurations, and an efficient conversion of vacuum energy into radiation. Within the Standard Model, this provides a minimal and self-consistent reheating mechanism.
I will outline the theoretical framework underlying this dynamics and discuss its cosmological implications. The interplay between curvature, vacuum stability, and non-perturbative evolution yields a predictive scenario that connects electroweak-scale physics with potentially observable stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds.