Related papers: (No) Eternal Inflation and Precision Higgs Physics
The Higgs field is an attractive candidate for the inflaton because it is an observationally confirmed fundamental scalar field. Importantly, it can be modeled by the most general renormalizable scalar potential. However, if the classical…
Allowing for the possibility of large extra dimensions, the fundamental Planck scale $M$ could be anywhere in the range $\TeV\lsim M\lsim \mpl$, where $\mpl=2.4\times 10^{18}\GeV$ is the four-dimensional Planck scale. If $M\sim\TeV$,…
We consider the effect of a period of inflation with a high energy density upon the stability of the Higgs potential in the early universe. The recent measurement of a large tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r_T \sim 0.16$, by the BICEP-2 experiment…
The observed Higgs mass $M_H=125.9\pm0.4$GeV leads to the criticality of the Standard Model, that is, the Higgs potential becomes flat around the scale $10^{17\text{--}18}$GeV for the top mass $171.3$GeV. Earlier we have proposed a Higgs…
Experimental data suggest that the Higgs potential has a lower ground state at high field values. Consequently, decaying from the electroweak to the true vacuum nucleates bubbles that expand rapidly and can have dire consequences for our…
Extrapolating the Standard Model Higgs potential at high energies, we study the barrier between the electroweak and Planck scale minima. The barrier arises by taking the central values of the relevant experimental inputs, that is the strong…
When the particle with mass $\sim 126$ GeV discovered at LHC is identified with the Higgs boson of the Standard Model, intriguing and challenging questions arise. Among them, the issue of the EW vacuum stability. We find that, despite…
We consider the inflation model generated by the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson having a strong non-minimal curvature coupling. This model suggests the range of the Higgs mass $135.6\; {\rm GeV} \lesssim M_H\lesssim 184.5\;{\rm GeV}$…
This paper explores various aspects and implications of the initial configuration of the Standard Model (SM) Higgs field at the beginning of our Universe. It is well known that the SM Higgs field features a deeper, more stable minimum at…
We present a new solution to the hierarchy problem, where the Higgs mass is at its observed electroweak value because such a patch inflates the most in the early universe. If the Higgs mass depends on a field undergoing quantum fluctuations…
Higgs vacuum stability has important consequences for cosmology. In particular, we argue that if the Higgs vacuum is metastable, then the dark matter cannot contain a single black hole of mass less than $10^{15}{\rm g}$ in our entire past…
We study the theoretical correlation between the Higgs mass of the minimal standard model and the scale at which new physics is expected to occur. In addition to the classic constraints of unitarity, triviality and vacuum stability, we…
If the Higgs boson has a mass below 130 GeV, then the standard model vacuum is unstable; if it has a mass below 90 GeV (i.e. within reach of LEP within the next two years), then the instability will occur at a scale between 800 GeV and 10…
The predictions of Standard Model Higgs inflation are in excellent agreement with the Planck data, without the need for new fields. However, consistency of the theory requires the presence of (unknown) threshold corrections. These modify…
The direct coupling between the Higgs field and the spacetime curvature, if finely tuned, is known to stabilize the Higgs boson mass. The fine-tuning is soft because the Standard Model (SM) parameters are subject to no fine-tuning thanks to…
We consider the possibility that the gauge hierarchy is a byproduct of the metastability of the electroweak vacuum, i.e., that whatever mechanism is responsible for the latter also sets the running Higgs mass to a value smaller than its…
The observed Higgs mass indicates that the Standard Model can be valid up to near the Planck scale $M_\text{P}$. Within this framework, it is important to examine how little modification is necessary to fit the recent experimental results…
The long-awaited Higgs particle H around 125 GeV has been observed at the LHC. Interpreting it as the standard model Higgs boson and if there is no new physics between electroweak and Planck scale, we then don't have a stable vacuum. Here,…
The LHC will probe the nature of the vacuum that determines the properties of particles and the forces between them. Of particular importance is the fact that our current theories allow the Universe to be trapped in a metastable vacuum,…
Supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model have been in vogue for over half a century. They have many interesting theoretical properties like calculability, absence of quadratic divergences, and phenomenologically impactful features…