Related papers: The Electroweak Vacuum Decay and the Gravitational…
I discuss the stability of the SM scalar potential in view of the discovery of a Higgs boson with mass around 125 GeV. The role played by the top quark mass in the choice between the full stability and the metastability conditions is…
For variable gravity models the strength of gravity, as measured by Newton's ``constant'' or the Planck mass, depends on the value of a scalar field, the cosmon. We discuss two simple four-parameter models with a quadratic or constant…
In general electroweak models with weakly coupled (and otherwise arbitrary) Higgs sector there always exists in the spectrum a scalar state with mass controlled by the electroweak scale. A new and simple recipe to compute an analytical…
The Higgs effective potential becomes unstable at approximately $10^{11}$ GeV, and if only standard model interactions are considered, the lifetime $\tau$ of the electroweak vacuum turns out to be much larger than the age of the Universe…
Recent results from ATLAS and CMS point to a narrow range for the Higgs mass: $M_H\in[ 124, 126] {\rm GeV}$. Given this range, a case may be made for new physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) because of the resultant vacuum stability…
The Einstein static (ES) state is a good candidate for describing the very early universe in terms of a regular cosmological model in which the Big Bang singularity is avoided. In the present study we propose an ES solution in the framework…
An alternative to the idea of a metastable electroweak vacuum would be an initial restriction to the pure scalar sector of the Standard Model, but describing spontaneous symmetry breaking consistently with studies indicating that there are…
A decay of weakly metastable phase coupled to two-dimensional Liouville gravity is considered in the semiclassical approximation. The process is governed by the ``critical swelling'', where the droplet fluctuation favors a gravitational…
If the Standard Model (SM) of elementary particle physics is assumed to hold good to arbitrarily high energies, then, for the best fit values of the parameters, the scalar potential of the Standard Model Higgs field turns negative at a high…
This review provides an elementary discussion of electroweak symmetry breaking in the minimal and the next-to-minimal supersymmetric models with the focus on the fine-tuning problem -- the tension between natural electroweak symmetry…
Motivated by natural inflation, we propose a relaxation mechanism consistent with inflationary cosmology that explains the hierarchy between the electroweak scale and Planck scale. This scenario is based on a selection mechanism that…
The Multiple Point Principle, according to which there exist many vacuum states with the same energy density, is put forward as a fine-tuning mechanism. By assuming the existence of three degenerate vacua, we derive the hierarchical ratio…
We have studied imposing the condition that the Standard Model effective Higgs potential should have two approximately degenerate vacua, such that the vacuum we live in is just barely metastable: the one in which we live has a vacuum…
We construct a supersymmetric version of the Standard Model which contains a long-lived metastable vacuum. In this vacuum supersymmetry is broken and the electroweak symmetry is Higgsed, and we identify it with the physical ground state of…
We consider the existence and stability of the Einstein static universe under the Generalized Uncertainty Principle (GUP) effects. We show that this solution in the presence of perfect fluid with a minimal length is cyclically stable around…
Owing to the quadratic nature of the theory, Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity generically permits two distinct vacuum solutions. One solution (the "Einstein" vacuum) has a well defined limit as the Gauss-Bonnet coupling goes to zero, whereas…
The stability of the minisuperspace model of the early universe is studied by solving the Wheeler-DeWitt equation numerically. We consider a system of Einstein gravity with a scalar field. When we solve the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, we pick…
If the Standard Model (SM) is an effective theory, as currently believed, it is valid up to some energy scale $\Lambda$ to which the Higgs vacuum expectation value is sensitive throughout radiative quadratic terms. The latter ones…
In the standard scenario, the electroweak phase transition is a first order phase transition which completes by the nucleation of critical bubbles. Recently, there has been speculation that the standard picture of the electroweak phase…
We present a new solution to the Higgs hierarchy problem based on dynamical vacuum selection in a landscape scanning the Higgs mass. In patches where the Higgs mass parameter takes a natural value, the Higgs potential only admits a minimum…