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Triggering Higgs vacuum decay

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2023-09-07 v2 High Energy Physics - Experiment High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

The Standard Model Higgs potential seems unstable at field values h>htop1010GeVh > h_{\rm top} \sim 10^{10}\,{\rm GeV}. Vacuum decay can be triggered by N4π/λ1000N\sim 4\pi/\lambda \sim 1000 overlapped Higgs bosons with energy λhtop\sqrt{\lambda} h_{\rm top}. However, this configuration is stimulated by ultra-high energy collisions with a exp(O(N))\exp(-{\cal O}(N)) suppression, comparable to spontaneous vacuum decay: no `Higgspolosion' enhancement arises. This implies that ultra-high energy cosmic ray collisions are safe, despite that their number (in production sites) likely is tens of orders of magnitude higher than what usually estimated (in space). We speculate on how vacuum decay could be induced classically, forming a in-coming wave of NN boosted Higgs bosons at futuristic ultra-high energy colliders, and on how the resulting vacuum bubble could be controlled to extract energy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.03620,
  title  = {Triggering Higgs vacuum decay},
  author = {Alessandro Strumia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.03620},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

24 pages, 7 figures. v2: final version to appear on JHEP

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:07:58.591Z