Even if nothing but a light Higgs is observed at the LHC , suggesting that the Standard Model is unmodified up to scales far above the weak scale , Higgs physics can yield surprises of fundamental significance for cosmology .
As has long been known , the Standard Model vacuum may be metastable for low enough Higgs mass , but a specific value of the decay rate holds special significance : for a very narrow window of parameters , our Universe has not yet decayed but the current inflationary period can not be future eternal .
Determining whether we are in this window requires exquisite but achievable experimental precision , with a measurement of the Higgs mass to 0.1 GeV at the LHC , the top mass to 60 MeV at a linear collider , as well as an improved determination of \alpha _ { s } by an order of magnitude on the lattice .
If the parameters are observed to lie in this special range , particle physics will establish that the future of our Universe is a global big crunch , without harboring pockets of eternal inflation , strongly suggesting that eternal inflation is censored by the fundamental theory .
This conclusion could be drawn even more sharply if metastability with the appropriate decay rate is found in the MSSM , where the physics governing the instability can be directly probed at the TeV scale .