Speaker
Sami Nurmi
Description
Non-equilibrium processes during inflation and reheating could have triggered a fatal transition away from the metastable electroweak vacuum. The fact that this did not happen is a non-trivial consistency test of the Standard Model of particle physics and its extensions. I review the vacuum stability analysis and discuss how the survival of the electroweak vacuum constrains the non-minimal curvature coupling of the Higgs field, the last unknown parameter of the Standard Model.
