Related papers: The Electroweak Vacuum Decay and the Gravitational…
We discuss the vacuum energy density term resulting from the spontaneous breakdown of the electroweak gauge symmetry, in the Higgs Mechanism. We alternatively expand the scalar field at one of the degenerate states that lie outside the…
We compute the quantum gravitational contributions to the standard model effective potential and analyze their effects on the Higgs vacuum stability in the framework of effective field theory. Non-renormalizability of Einstein gravity…
The measured values of the Higgs and top quark mass indicate that the electroweak vacuum is metastable if there is no new physics below the Planck scale. This is at odds with a period of high scale inflation. A non-minimal coupling between…
The Higgs boson discovery at the LHC with a mass of approximately 126 GeV suggests, that the electroweak vacuum of the standard model may be metastable at very high energies. However, any new physics beyond the standard model can change…
The Higgs naturalness problem is solved if the growth of Einstein's gravitational interaction is softened at an energy $ \lesssim 10^{11}\,$GeV (softened gravity). We work here within an explicit realization where the Einstein-Hilbert…
A new class of solutions to the electroweak hierarchy problem is presented that does not require either weak scale dynamics or anthropics. Dynamical evolution during the early universe drives the Higgs mass to a value much smaller than the…
Extrapolating the Standard Model to high scales using the renormalisation group, three possibilities arise, depending on the mass of the Higgs boson: if the Higgs mass is large enough the Higgs self-coupling may blow up, entailing some new…
Scale invariance supplemented by the requirement of the absence of new heavy particles may play an important role in addressing the hierarchy problem. We discuss how the Standard Model may become scale invariant at the quantum level above a…
We examine the gauge dependence of lower bounds on the Higgs mass obtained from the requirement that the electroweak vacuum be the global minimum of the effective potential. We study a simple model, the spontaneously-broken Abelian Higgs…
Even if nothing but a light Higgs is observed at the LHC, suggesting that the Standard Model is unmodified up to scales far above the weak scale, Higgs physics can yield surprises of fundamental significance for cosmology. As has long been…
We point out that it is possible to associate the electroweak Higgs boson with the pseudo-Goldstone boson of broken scale invariance, thus resolving the hierarchy problem in a technically natural way. We illustrate this idea with two…
The measurement of the Higgs mass at the LHC has confirmed that the Standard Model electroweak vacuum is a shallow local minimum and is not absolutely stable. In addition to a probable unacceptably fast tunneling to the deep true minimum,…
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 study the stability of the Electroweak (EW) vacuum in a scale-invariant extension of the Standard Model and General Relativity, known as a Higgs-Dilaton theory. The safety of the EW vacuum against possible transition towards another…
The Einstein static universe has played a central role in a number of emergent scenarios recently put forward to deal with the singular origin of the standard cosmological model. Here we study the existence and stability of the Einstein…
Motivated by the stability of the electroweak Higgs vacuum we consider the possibility that the Standard Model might work up to large scales between about $10^{10}$ GeV and close to the Planck scale. A plausible scenario is an emergent…
The measured (central) values of the Higgs and top quark masses indicate that the Standard Model (SM) effective potential develops an instability at high field values. The scale of this instability, determined as the Higgs field value at…
The stability of the electroweak vacuum imposes important constraints on new physics models. Such new physics models may introduce one or more new thermal phases with a lower free energy than that of the electroweak vacuum. In this case,…
The possibility that the Standard Model (SM) is valid up to the Planck scale $M_P$, i.e. that new physics occurs only around $M_P$, is nowadays largely explored. For a metastable EW vacuum, we show that new physics interactions can have a…
If the Higgs mass m_H is as low as suggested by present experimental information, the Standard Model ground state might not be absolutely stable. We present a detailed analysis of the lower bounds on m_H imposed by the requirement that the…