Related papers: Mass Hierarchy and Vacuum Energy
Perturbative calculations predict that the Standard Model (SM) effective potential should have a new minimum, well beyond the Planck scale, much deeper than the electroweak vacuum. As it is not obvious that gravitational effects can get so…
It is shown that gravitation naturally emerges from the standard model of particle physics if local scale invariance is imposed in the context of a single conformal (Weyl-symmetric) theory. Gravitation is then conformally-related to the…
In the case of a metastable electroweak vacuum the quantum corrected effective potential plays a crucial role in the potential instability of the Standard Model. In the Early Universe, in particular during inflation and reheating, this…
A brief review of the role of the Higgs mechanism and the ensuing Higgs particle in the Minimal Standard Model is given. Then the property of triviality of the scalar sector in the Minimal Standard Model and the upper bound on the Higgs…
Modification to the behavior of geometrical density at short scales is a key result of loop quantum cosmology, responsible for an interesting phenomenology in the very early universe. We demonstrate the way matter with arbitrary scale…
Recent LHC results concerning the mass of the Higgs boson indicate that the vacuum in our Universe may be unstable. We analyze properties of unstable vacuum states from the point of view of the quantum theory of unstable states. From the…
If dark energy is a form of quintessence driven by a scalar field $\phi$ evolving down a monotonically decreasing potential $V(\phi)$ that passes sufficiently below zero, the universe is destined to undergo a series of smooth transitions.…
We extract from data the parameters of the Higgs potential, the top Yukawa coupling and the electroweak gauge couplings with full 2-loop NNLO precision, and we extrapolate the SM parameters up to large energies with full 3-loop NNLO RGE…
In this letter we address some of the issues raised in the literature about the conflict between a large vacuum energy density, apriori predicted by quantum field theory, and the observed dark energy which must be the energy of vacuum or…
Introducing a vacuum angle $\theta_h$ in a strongly interacting hidden sector like QCD, we study how $\theta_h$ affects physical quantities in a scale invariant extension of the standard model with that hidden sector. In this model the…
We investigate naturalness in the Standard Model (SM) Higgs sector using effective field theory (EFT) techniques and find the requirements on the new heavy physics that can potentially cure the little hierarchy problem below a scale…
If the mass of the Higgs boson is put to zero, the classical Lagrangian of the Standard Model (SM) becomes conformally invariant (CI). Taking into account quantum non-perturbative QCD effects violating CI leads to electroweak symmetry…
We consider the application of the multiple point criticality principle to the pure Standard Model, with a desert up to the Planck scale. According to this principle, Nature should choose coupling constant values such that the vacuum can…
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…
A six parameter cosmological model, involving a vacuum energy density that is extremely tiny compared to fundamental particle physics scales, describes a large body of increasingly accurate astronomical data. In a first part of this brief…
Does the value of the Higgs mass parameter affect the expectation value of local operators in the Standard Model? For essentially all local operators the answer to this question is "no", and this is one of the avatars of the hierarchy…
Recent measurements at the LHC suggest that the current Higgs vacuum could be metastable with a modest barrier (height 10^{10-12}{GeV})^{4}) separating it from a ground state with negative vacuum density of order the Planck scale. We note…
Realizations of scale invariance are studied in the context of a gravitational theory where the action (in the first order formalism) is of the form $S = \int L_{1} \Phi d^{4}x$ + $\int L_{2}\sqrt{-g}d^{4}x$ where $\Phi$ is a density built…
Quantum field theory predicts that vacuum energy (or what is the same, cosmological constant) should be 50-100 orders of magnitude larger than the existing astronomical limit. A very brief review of possible solutions of this problem is…
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…