A new study has revealed that gravity may have saved the universe from collapsing immediately after the Big Bang.
Studies of the Higgs particle have suggested that the production of Higgs particles during the accelerating expansion of the very early universe (inflation) should have led to instability and collapse.
Physicists from Imperial College London, and the Universities of Copenhagen and Helsinki have described how the spacetime curvature - in effect, gravity - provided the stability needed for the universe to survive expansion in that early period and investigated the interaction between the Higgs particles and gravity, taking into account how it would vary with energy.
Professor Arttu Rajantie, from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London said that their research investigates the last unknown parameter in the Standard Model - the interaction between the Higgs particle and gravity. This parameter cannot be measured in particle accelerator experiments, but it has a big effect on the Higgs instability during inflation. Even a relatively small value is enough to explain the survival of the universe without any new physics.
Rajantie added that their aim is to measure the interaction between gravity and the Higgs field using cosmological data and if they are able to do that, we will have supplied the last unknown number in the Standard Model of particle physics and be closer to answering fundamental questions about how we are all here.
The study was published in Physical Review Letters.