Related papers: Cosmological stochastic Higgs stabilization
Our current measurements of the Standard Model parameters imply that the Higgs field resides in a metastable electroweak vacuum, where the vacuum can decay to a lower ground state, with cataclysmic repercussions for our Universe. According…
The issue of electroweak vacuum stability is studied in presence of a scalar field which participates in modifying the minimal chaotic inflation model. It is shown that the threshold effect on the Higgs quartic coupling originating from the…
We consider the possibility of an oscillating scalar field accounting for dark matter and dynamically controlling the spontaneous breaking of the electroweak symmetry through a Higgs-portal coupling. This requires a late decay of the…
The behaviour of oscillating scalar spectator fields after inflation depends on the thermal background produced by inflaton decay. Resonant decay of the spectator is often blocked by large induced thermal masses. We account for the finite…
The Standard Model Higgs potential becomes unstable at large field values. After clarifying the issue of gauge dependence of the effective potential, we study the cosmological evolution of the Higgs field in presence of this instability…
Inflation is nowadays a well-established paradigm consistent with all the observations. The precise nature of the inflaton is however unknown and its role could be played by any candidate able to imitate a scalar condensate in the slow-roll…
The Standard Model Higgs potential becomes unstable at large Higgs field values where its quartic coupling becomes negative. While the tunneling lifetime of our current electroweak vacuum is comfortably longer than the age of the universe,…
We study the stability of the electroweak vacuum in low-scale inflation models whose Hubble parameter is much smaller than the instability scale of the Higgs potential. In general, couplings between the inflaton and Higgs are present, and…
Measurements of the Higgs boson and top quark masses indicate that the Standard Model Higgs potential becomes unstable around $\Lambda_I \sim 10^{11}$ GeV. This instability is cosmologically relevant since quantum fluctuations during…
Within the Standard Model, the current Higgs and top quark data favor metastability of the electroweak vacuum, although the uncertainties are still significant. The true vacuum is many orders of magnitude deeper than ours and the barrier…
Current measurements of Standard Model parameters suggest that the electroweak vacuum is metastable. This metastability has important cosmological implications, because large fluctuations in the Higgs field could trigger vacuum decay in the…
A remarkable prediction of the Standard Model is that, in the absence of corrections lifting the energy density, the Higgs potential becomes negative at large field values. If the Higgs field samples this part of the potential during…
The current central experimental values of the parameters of the Standard Model give rise to a striking conclusion: metastability of the electroweak vacuum is favoured over absolute stability. A metastable vacuum for the Higgs boson implies…
The Higgs-inflaton coupling plays an important role in the Higgs field dynamics in the early Universe. Even a tiny coupling generated at loop level can have a dramatic effect on the fate of the electroweak vacuum. Such Higgs-inflaton…
We show that the Standard Model vacuum can be stabilized if all particle propagators are non-minimally coupled to gravity. This is due to a Higgs-background dependent redefinition of the Standard Model fields: in terms of canonical…
During inflation, scalar fields with masses less than the Hubble scale acquire vacuum expectation values (vevs) via stochastic processes driven by quantum fluctuations. For nearly massless spectator scalars transforming nontrivially under a…
The current experimentally measured parameters of the Standard Model (SM) suggest that our Universe lies in a metastable electroweak vacuum, where the Higgs field is prone to vacuum decay to a lower state with catastrophic consequences. Our…
We discuss the cosmological constant puzzle and possible connections to the (meta-)stability of the Higgs vacuum suggested by recent LHC results. A possible explanation involves new critical phenomena in the ultraviolet, close to the Planck…
The measurements of the Higgs mass and top Yukawa coupling indicate that we live in a very special Universe, at the edge of the absolute stability of the electroweak vacuum. If fully stable, the Standard Model (SM) can be extended all the…
The measured Standard Model parameters lie in a range such that the Higgs potential, once extrapolated up to high scales, develops a minimum of negative energy density. This has important cosmological implications. In particular, during…