Por Javier Rubio (Center for Astrophysics and Gravitation, Instituto Superior Técnico).
The precise measurements of the Higgs mass and the top quark Yukawa coupling at the Large Hadron Collider indicate that we live in a very special universe, at the very edge of absolute vacuum stability. This surprising outcome allows us to speculate about consistently extending the Standard Model all the way up to the Planck scale while staying in the perturbative regime. In this context, the Higgs field non-minimally coupled to gravity could be responsible for the properties of the Universe at large scales and the generation of the primordial spectrum of curvature perturbations seeding structure formation. In this talk, I will review the Higgs inflation paradigm in different gravity incarnations, discussing the associated predictions, open issues and potential implications for the infamous hierarchy problem.
Short bio: Javier Rubio obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Afterwards, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the University of Heidelberg and the Helsinki Institute of Physics. Currently, he is a FCT Assistant Researcher at the Center for Astrophysics and Gravitation of the Instituto Superior Técnico.
