  We study the possible effects of classical gravitational backgrounds on the
Higgs field through the modifications induced in the one-loop effective
potential and the vacuum expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor. We
concentrate our study on the Higgs self-interaction contribution in a perturbed
FRW metric. For weak and slowly varying gravitational fields, a complete set of
mode solutions for the Klein-Gordon equation is obtained to leading order in
the adiabatic approximation. Dimensional regularization has been used in the
integral evaluation and a detailed study of the integration of nonrational
functions in this formalism has been presented. As expected, the regularized
effective potential contains the same divergences as in flat spacetime, which
can be renormalized without the need of additional counterterms. We find that,
in contrast with other regularization methods, even though metric perturbations
affect the mode solutions, they do not contribute to the leading adiabatic
order of the potential. We also obtain explicit expressions of the complete
energy-momentum tensor for general nonminimal coupling in terms of the
perturbed modes. The corresponding leading adiabatic contributions are also
obtained.
