(No) Eternal Inflation and Precision Higgs Physics

by Giovanni Villadoro (Universita di Roma I "La Sapienza"-Universita & INFN, Roma I-Unk)

Thursday 13 Nov 2008, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Theory Conference Room (CERN)

Even if nothing but a light Higgs is observed at the LHC, suggesting that the Standard Model is unmodified up to scales far above the weak scale, Higgs physics can yield surprises of fundamental significance for cosmology. I will discuss how a precise determination of the Higgs mass and other Standard Model parameters might rule out the possibility that our Universe will accelerate forever, strongly suggesting that eternal inflation is censored by the fundamental theory. This conclusion could be drawn even more sharply if metastability with the appropriate decay rate is found in the MSSM, where the physics governing the instability can be directly probed at the TeV scale.