The detection of an oscillating pattern in the bispectrum of density perturbations could suggest the existence of a high-energy second minimum in the Higgs potential. If the Higgs field resided in this new minimum during inflation and was brought back to the electroweak vacuum by thermal corrections during reheating, the coupling of Standard Model particles to the inflaton would leave its imprint on the bispectrum. We focus on the fermions, whose dispersion relation can be modified by the coupling to the inflaton, leading to an enhanced particle production during inflation even if their mass during inflation is larger than the Hubble scale. This results in a large non-analytic contribution to non-Gaussianities, with an amplitude f NL as large as 100 in the squeezed limit, potentially detectable in future 21-cm surveys. Measuring the contributions from two fermions would allow us to compute the ratio of their masses, and to ascribe the origin of the signal to a new Higgs minimum. Such a discovery would be a tremendous step towards understanding the vacuum instability of the Higgs potential, and could have fascinating implications for anthropic considerations.

中文翻译：

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搜索其他真空。第二部分。宇宙对撞机的新历史

在密度扰动双谱中检测到振荡模式可能表明希格斯势能中存在高能第二最小值。如果希格斯场在暴胀过程中停留在这个新的最小值，并在再加热过程中通过热校正被带回电弱真空，标准模型粒子与暴胀子的耦合将在双谱上留下印记。我们关注费米子，它们的色散关系可以通过与暴胀子的耦合来修改，即使它们在暴胀过程中的质量大于哈勃尺度，也会导致暴胀过程中粒子产生的增加。这导致对非高斯性的大量非解析贡献，振幅 f NL 在压缩极限中高达 100，可能在未来的 21 厘米调查中检测到。测量两个费米子的贡献将使我们能够计算它们的质量比，并将信号的起源归因于新的希格斯最小值。这样的发现将是朝着理解希格斯势的真空不稳定性迈出的一大步，并且可能对人为考虑产生迷人的影响。