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Abstract
The discovery of the Standard Model Higgs boson opens up a range of speculative cosmological scenarios, from the formation of structure in the early universe immediately after the big bang, to relics from the electroweak phase transition one nanosecond after the big bang, on to the end of the present-day universe through vacuum decay. Higgs physics is wide ranging, and gives an impetus to go beyond the Standard Models of particle physics and cosmology to explore the physics of ultra-high energies and quantum gravity.
Acknowledgements
Section 5 contains some work done in collaboration with Philipp Burda and Ruth Gregory.
Notes
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
1 These calculations usually proceed by using a fictitious metric called the Einstein frame [Citation24]. The results here have been calculated using the physical metric of the Standard Model, or the ‘Jordan frame’.