Related papers: Higgs Cosmology and Dark Matter
The observed dark energy in the universe might give particles inertial mass. We investigate one realization of this idea, that the dark energy field might be a decayed scalar component of a supermultiplet field in the early universe that…
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…
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…
We argue that the rate of Standard Model vacuum or thermal decay seeded by primordial black holes is negligible (because non-perturbatively suppressed by the small quartic Higgs coupling) and independent of the non-minimal coupling of the…
We consider the possibility that small black holes can act as nucleation seeds for the decay of a metastable vacuum, focussing particularly on the Higgs potential. Using a thin-wall bubble approximation for the nucleation process, which is…
The Higgs boson is in the backbone of the standard model of electroweak interactions. It must exist in some form for achieving unification of interactions. In the gauge-Higgs unification scenario the Higgs boson becomes a part of the…
The Large Volume Scenario for getting a non-supersymmetric vacuum in type IIB string theory leads, through the Weyl anomaly and renormalization group running, to an interesting phenomenology. However, for gravitino masses below 500 TeV…
We explore possible effects of vacuum energy on the evolution of black holes. If the universe contains a cosmological constant, and if black holes can absorb energy from the vacuum, then black hole evaporation could be greatly suppressed.…
Triggering the electroweak symmetry breaking may not be the only key role played by the Higgs boson in particle physics. In a recently proposed warped five-dimensional $SO(5)\otimes U(1)$ gauge-Higgs unification model the Higgs boson can…
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…
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…
We have recently suggested that tiny black holes can act as nucleation seeds for the decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum. Previous results applied only to the nucleation of thin-wall bubbles, and covered a very small region of parameter…
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 discovery of the Higgs boson by the LHC and the measurement of its mass at around 125 GeV, taken together with the absence of signals of physics beyond the standard model, make it possible that we might live in a metastable electroweak…
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 Hawking evaporation of primordial black holes (PBH) reheats the Universe locally, forming hot spots that survive throughout their lifetime. We propose to use the temperature profile of such hot spots to calculate the decay rate of…
We propose that dark matter consists of collections of atoms encapsulated inside pieces of an alternative vacuum, in which the Higgs field vacuum expectation value is appreciably smaller than in the usual vacuum. The alternative vacuum is…
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…
We introduce a new approach to the Higgs naturalness problem, where the value of the Higgs mass is tied to cosmic stability and the possibility of a large observable Universe. The Higgs mixes with the dilaton of a CFT sector whose true…
Estimates of the Higgs and top quark masses, $m_{H} \simeq 125.10 \pm 0.14$ [GeV] and $m_{t} \simeq 172.76 \pm 0.30$ [GeV] based on the experimental results place the Standard Model in the region of the metastable vacuum. A consequence of…