Related papers: Coarse-Grained Fluctuation Probabilities in the St…
We review the constraints on Higgs boson properties from effective potential methods. In the Standard Model, the requirement of stability (or metastability) of the standard electroweak minimum puts an upper bound on the scale of new physics…
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…
If the Standard Model is valid up to scales near the Planck mass, and if the cosmological constant and Higgs mass parameters scan on a landscape of vacua, it is well known that the observed orders of magnitude of these quantities can be…
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…
The minimal supersymmetric standard model, and extensions, have stringent upper bounds on the mass of the lightest Higgs boson if perturbativity up to the Planck scale is assumed. We argue that these bounds are softened tremendously if the…
We assume the validity of the Standard Model up to an arbitrary high-energy scale and discuss what information on the early stages of the Universe can be extracted from a measurement of the Higgs mass. For Mh < 130 GeV, the Higgs potential…
Recent progress in the theory of the electroweak phase transition is discussed. For the Higgs boson mass smaller than the masses of W and Z bosons, the phase transition is of the first order. However, its strength is approximately 2/3 times…
We study the dynamics of electroweak bubbles in the scenario of a strong first order inverse electroweak phase transition at the TeV scale involving the global structure of the nonlinear sigma field in the littlest Higgs model with T…
In a weakly first order phase transition the typical scale of a subcritical bubble calculated in our previous papers turned out to be too small. At this scale quantum fluctuations may dominate and our previous classical result may be…
We consider a possibility that the Higgs field in the Standard Model (SM) serves as an inflaton when its value is around the Planck scale. We assume that the SM is valid up to an ultraviolet cutoff scale \Lambda, which is slightly below the…
We investigate the evolution of the electroweak phase transition, using a one-Higgs effective potential that can be regarded as an approximation for the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. The phase transition occurs in a small interval…
We estimate the amplitude of thermal fluctuations by calculating the typical size of subcritical bubbles in cosmological electroweak phase transition and show that this thermal fluctuation effect drastically changes dynamics of the phase…
Depending on the Higgs-boson and top-quark masses, $M_H$ and $M_t$, the effective potential of the Standard Model can develop a non-standard minimum for values of the field much larger than the weak scale. In those cases the standard…
If the Higgs mass m_H is as low as suggested by present experimental information, the Standard Model ground state might not be absolutely stable. We present a detailed analysis of the lower bounds on m_H imposed by the requirement that the…
We ask to what extent an isolated quantum system can eventually "contract" to be contained within a given Hilbert subspace. We do this by starting with an initial random state, considering the probability that all the particles will be…
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…
We estimate bubble-nucleation rates for cosmological phase transitions. We concentrate on the evaluation of the pre-exponential factor, for which we give approximate analytical expressions. Our approach relies on the use of a real…
We present a consistent calculation of bubble-nucleation rates in theories of two scalar fields. Our approach is based on the notion of a coarse-grained free energy that incorporates the effects of fluctuations with momenta above a given…
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…
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…