Speaker
Prof.
Arttu Rajantie
Description
When extrapolated to high energies, the Standard Model of particle physics predicts that the current vacuum state is metastable. Its predicted decay rate is currently extremely low, but it would have been much higher in the early Universe. Therefore the fact that the Universe survived its first moments places constraints on both the cosmological history and on particle physics. I will discuss and review these constraints, focussing particularly on the bounds that can be obtained for the non-minimal couplings between the Higgs field and spacetime curvature.
