Related papers: Coarse-Grained Fluctuation Probabilities in the St…
[Talk presented at the International Seminar Quarks `92, Zvenigorod, Russia, May 11-17, 1992.] The electroweak vacuum need not be absolutely stable. For certain top and Higgs masses in the Minimal Standard Model, it is instead metastable…
We study the decay of the metastable symmetric phase in the standard model at finite temperature. For the SU(2)-Higgs model the two wave function correction terms $Z_{\vp}(\vp^2,T)$ and $Z_{\chi}(\vp^2,T)$ of Higgs and Goldstone boson…
We present a lattice method to compute bubble nucleation rates at radiatively induced first order phase transitions, in high temperature, weakly coupled field theories, nonperturbatively. A generalization of Langer's approach, it makes no…
The extension of the standard model to SU(3)_L x SU(3)_R x SU(3)_C is considered. Spontaneous symmetry breaking requires two Higgs field multiplets with a strong hierarchical structure of vacuum expectation values. These vacuum expectation…
We consider the extension of the standard model with an arbitrary number of U(1) gauge fields coupled to baryon-minus-lepton number and/or hypercharge. Under the assumption that A^b_FB from the LEP1 experiment is an unlucky fluctuation, we…
We have explored the electroweak phase transition in minimal supergravity models by extending previous analysis of the one-loop Higgs potential to include finite temperature effects. Minimal supergravity is characterized by two higgs…
Depending on the Higgs-boson and top-quark masses, $M_H$ and $M_t$, the effective potential of the Standard Model at finite (and zero) temperature can have a deep and unphysical stable minimum $\langle \phi(T)\rangle$ at values of the field…
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…
Composite Higgs models provide an attractive solution to the hierarchy problem. However, many realistic models suffer from tuning problems in the Higgs potential. There are often large contributions from the UV dynamics of the composite…
It is known that the present electroweak vacuum is likely to be metastable and it may lead to a serious instability during/after inflation. We propose a simple solution to the problem of vacuum instability during/after inflation. If there…
Current measurements of Standard Model parameters suggest that the electroweak vacuum is metastable. This metastability has important cosmological implications, because large fluctuations in the Higgs field could trigger vacuum decay in the…
We discuss an alternative to the Higgs mechanism which leads to gauge invariant masses for the electroweak bosons. The key idea is to reformulate the gauge invariance principle which, instead of being applied as usual at the level of the…
The Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) can incorporate inflation, where a combination of the Higgs-doublet fields plays the role of the inflaton. At the high scale, the Higgs doublets are non-minimally coupled to…
We analyse the self-consistency of inflation in the Standard Model, where the Higgs field has a large non-minimal coupling to gravity. We determine the domain of energies in which this model represents a valid effective field theory as a…
Phase transitions induced by high temperatures and strong magnetic fields are investigated in the Standard model. The consistent effective potential including the one-loop and ring diagram contributions is calculated and investigated for…
Motivated in part by recent demonstrations that electroweak unification into a simple group may occur at a low scale, we detail the requirements on the Higgs mass if the unification is to be perturbative. We do this for the Standard Model…
The renormalization-group equation for the zero-point energies associated with vacuum fluctuations of massive fields from the Standard Model is examined. Our main observation is that at any scale the running is necessarily dominated by the…
In these lectures we present a brief review of the Higgs boson sector in the ``Standard Model'', and its Minimal Supersymmetric Extension, with particular emphasis on the main mechanisms for Higgs production and decay at LEP2 and LHC, and…
We present bounds on the Higgs mass in the Standard Model and in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model using the effective potential with next-to-leading logarithms resummed by the renormalization group equations, and physical (pole)…
Experimental probes of the recently discovered Higgs boson show that its behavior is close to that of the Standard Model (SM) Higgs particle. Extensions of the SM which include extra Higgs bosons are constrained by these observations,…