The Gravitational Wave Background and Higgs False Vacuum Inflation
  For a narrow band of values of the top quark and Higgs boson masses, the
Standard Model Higgs potential develops a shallow local minimum at energies of
about $10^{16}$ GeV, where primordial inflation could have started in a cold
metastable state. For each point of that band, the highness of the Higgs
potential at the false minimum is calculable, and there is an associated
prediction for the inflationary gravitational wave background, namely for the
tensor to scalar ratio $r$. We show that the recent measurement of $r$ by the
BICEP2 collaboration, $r=0.16 _{-0.05}^{+0.06}$ at $1\sigma$, combined with the
most up-to-date measurements of the top quark and Higgs boson masses, reveals
that the hypothesis that a Standard Model shallow false minimum was the source
of inflation in the early Universe is viable.
