Speaker
Antonio Lopez Maroto
Description
The standard Higgs mechanism for electroweak symmetry breaking
predicts, apart from the existence of a scalar boson, the
presence of a constant vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field.
The Higgs vev, being determined by the effective potential, can however
acquire space-time fluctuations from loop effects in inhomogeneous metric backgrounds.
In this talk, we will present recent results on the determination of the finite part of the one-loop effective potential in perturbed Robertson-Walker backgrounds which has
been obtained by means of dimensional regularization techniques. Potential astrophysical or cosmological signatures will be also discussed.
