Related papers: Triggering Higgs vacuum decay
In the Standard Model, the Higgs potential develops an instability at high field values when the quartic self-coupling runs negative. Large quantum fluctuations during cosmic inflation could drive the Higgs field beyond the potential…
So far, the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have shown no sign of new physics beyond the Standard Model. Assuming the Standard Model is correct at presently available energies, we can accurately extrapolate the theory to…
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,…
A version of the Standard Model is considered, where the electroweak symmetry breaking is provided by cosmological initial data given for the zeroth Fourier harmonic of the Higgs field $<\phi>$. The initial data symmetry breaking mechanism…
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…
The Standard Model Higgs potential may become unbounded from below at large field values, with important cosmological implications. For a potential of this form, the commonly assumed scenario of a nucleated thin-wall bubble driving the…
New physics at the TeV scale or lower may destabilise the electroweak vacuum. How low could the vacuum instability scale be? This fundamental question may be tied to a deeper understanding of the Higgs potential and its associated hierarchy…
If the Higgs boson weighs about 115 GeV, the effective potential of the Standard Model becomes unstable above a scale of about 10^6 GeV. This instability may be rectified only by new bosonic particles such as stop squarks. However, avoiding…
In the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), a Higgs boson mass of 125 GeV can be obtained with moderately heavy scalar top superpartners provided they are highly mixed. The source of this mixing, a soft trilinear stop-stop-Higgs…
We study the inflationary evolution of a scalar field $h$ with an unstable potential for the case where the Hubble parameter $H$ during inflation is larger than the instability scale $\Lambda_I$ of the potential. Quantum fluctuations in the…
We introduce and discuss two inter-related mechanisms operative in the electroweak sector of the Standard Model at high energies. Higgsplosion, the first mechanism, occurs at some critical energy in the 25 to 10^3 TeV range, and leads to an…
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…
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 paper examines frameworks and phenomenology of ultrarelativistic Higgs vacuum bubble collisions in a first-order phase transition associated with the Standard Model Higgs field in the early Universe. Such collisions act as a cosmic…
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…
We estimate the rate at which collisions between ultra-high energy cosmic rays can form small black holes in models with extra dimensions. If recent conjectures about false vacuum decay catalyzed by black hole evaporation apply, the lack of…
The self coupling $\lambda$ of the Higgs boson in the Standard Model may show critical behavior, i.e. the Higgs potential may have a point at an energy scale $\sim 10^{17-18}$ GeV where both the first and second derivatives (almost) vanish.…
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…
The Higgs boson may decay mainly to an invisible mode characterized by missing energy, instead of the Standard Model channels. This is a generic feature of many models where neutrino masses arise from the spontaneous breaking of ungauged…
It was recently demonstrated that small small black holes can act as seeds for nucleating decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum, dramatically increasing the tunneling probability. Any primordial black hole lighter than $4.5 \times 10^{14}$g…