Speaker
Description
When coupled to gravity, the Standard Model Higgs field can undergo non-trivial post-inflationary dynamics. In scenarios involving a short kination phase, the rapid change in spacetime curvature may destabilize the electroweak vacuum via curvature-induced tachyonic instabilities, effectively triggering a gravitationally driven phase transition. This mechanism can generate a rapid growth of Higgs fluctuations, the transient formation of field inhomogeneities, and an efficient conversion of vacuum energy into radiation, offering a minimal reheating channel within the Standard Model framework.
In this talk, I will describe the mechanism and discuss its cosmological implications. The interplay between spacetime curvature, vacuum stability, and non-perturbative dynamics leads to a predictive setup linking electroweak-scale physics to potentially observable stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds.