# (Higgs) vacuum decay during inflation

## TL;DR

This paper develops a formalism to compute gravitational corrections to vacuum decay during inflation, analyzing the transition between Coleman and Hawking-Moss bounces and applying it to the electroweak Higgs vacuum.

## Contribution

It introduces a perturbative expansion method for gravitational corrections in de Sitter space and refines bounds on inflationary Hubble scale from vacuum decay considerations.

## Key findings

- Reproduces known bounds on inflationary Hubble scale
- Shows the Coleman and Hawking-Moss bounces form a continuous deformation
- Provides a more precise calculation of electroweak vacuum decay during inflation

## Abstract

We develop the formalism for computing gravitational corrections to vacuum decay from de Sitter space as a sub-Planckian perturbative expansion. Non-minimal coupling to gravity can be encoded in an effective potential. The Coleman bounce continuously deforms into the Hawking-Moss bounce, until they coincide for a critical value of the Hubble constant. As an application, we reconsider the decay of the electroweak Higgs vacuum during inflation. Our vacuum decay computation reproduces and improves bounds on the maximal inflationary Hubble scale previously computed through statistical techniques.