Cosmological implications of Higgs field fluctuations during inflation

Cosmological implications of Higgs field fluctuations during inflation are considered. This study is based on the Standard Model and the standard quadratic model of chaotic inflation where the Higgs field is minimally coupled to gravity and has no direct coupling to the inflaton. In the Standard model the renormalisation group improved effective potential develops an instability (an additional minimum and maximum) at large field values. It is shown that such a new maximum should take place at an energy scale above $10^{14} \;\text{GeV},$ otherwise a universe like ours is extremely unlikely. The extension to the case of the Higgs field interacting with the inflaton field is discussed.