Related papers: Triggering Higgs vacuum decay
The effective potential of the Higgs scalar field in the Standard Model may have a second degenerate minimum at an ultrahigh vacuum expectation value. This second minimum then determines, by radiative corrections, the values of the…
The discovery of the Standard Model Higgs boson opens up a range of speculative cosmological scenarios, from the formation of structure in the early universe immediately after the big bang, to relics from the electroweak phase transition…
Depending on the Higgs-boson and top-quark masses, $M_H$ and $M_t$, the effective potential of the {\bf Standard Model} can develop a non-standard minimum for values of the field much larger than the weak scale. In those cases the standard…
The naturalness of a Higgs boson with a mass near 125 GeV is explored in a variety of weak-scale supersymmetric models. A Higgs mass of this size strongly points towards a non-minimal implementation of supersymmetry. The Minimal…
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…
The production mechanisms and decay modes of the heavy neutral and charged Higgs bosons in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model are investigated at future $e^+ e^-$ colliders in the TeV energy regime. We generate supersymmetric…
We critically examine the recent claim that the Standard Model Higgs boson ${\cal H}$ could drive inflation in agreement with observations if $|{\cal H}|^2$ has a strong coupling $\xi\sim 10^4$ to the Ricci curvature scalar. We first show…
It is proposed to replace the Higgs boson of the standard model by a Lorentz- and gauge-invariant combination of SU(2) gauge bosons. A pair of Higgs bosons is identified with pairs of gauge bosons by setting their mass Lagrangians equal to…
We study the instability of the Higgs vacuum caused by a cloud of strings. By catalysis, the decay rate of the vacuum is highly enhanced and, when the energy density of the cloud is larger than the critical value, a semi-classical vacuum…
We reconsider the lambda-SUSY model, in which the mass of the Higgs boson is raised already at tree level up to about 200 GeV via an additional interaction in the superpotential between the Higgs bosons and a Singlet, focusing on a scale…
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…
Two simple ways by which the standard signals of the Standard Model Higgs boson can be depleted are: its couplings to fermions and gauge bosons can be suppressed by a universal factor, and part of its branching fraction can be drained into…
In the Standard Model, the Higgs potential allows only one minimum at tree-level. But the open possibility that there might be two scalar doublets enriches the vacuum structure, allowing for the risk that we might now be in a metastable…
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…
We derive lower bounds for the Higgs-curvature coupling from vacuum stability during inflation in three inflationary models: quadratic and quartic chaotic inflation, and Starobinsky-like power-law inflation. In contrast to most previous…
Motivated by the recently proposed de Sitter swampland conjecture, a formally same condition imposed instead on the convex and real exact effective potential is contemplated. Compared to the original conjecture, the modified condition…
Recent analysis shows that if the 125-126 GeV LHC resonance turns out to be the Standard Model Higgs boson, the electroweak vacuum would be a metastable state at 98% C.L. In this paper we argue that, during inflation, the electroweak vacuum…
Results are reported from a search for non-standard-model Higgs boson decays to pairs of new light bosons, each of which decays into the oppositely charged dimuon final state. The new bosons may be produced either promptly or via a decay…
A search for Higgs boson decays to invisible particles is performed using 20.3 fb$^{-1}$ of $pp$ collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The process considered is Higgs…
If the Higgs boson has a mass below 130 GeV, then the standard model vacuum is unstable; if it has a mass below 90 GeV (i.e. within reach of LEP within the next two years), then the instability will occur at a scale between 800 GeV and 10…