English

Vacuum Stability in the Standard Model and Beyond

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-03-06 v4 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We revisit the stability of the Standard Model vacuum, and investigate its quantum effective potential using the highest available orders in perturbation theory and the most accurate determination of input parameters to date. We observe that the stability of the electroweak vacuum centrally depends on the values of the top mass and the strong coupling constant. We estimate that reducing their uncertainties by a factor of two to three is sufficient to establish or refute SM vacuum stability at the 5σ5\sigma level. We further investigate vacuum stability for a variety of singlet scalar field extensions with and without flavor using the Higgs portal mechanism. We identify the BSM parameter spaces for stability and find sizable room for new physics. We further study the phenomenology of Planck-safe models at colliders, and determine the impact on the Higgs trilinear, the Higgs-to-electroweak-boson, and the Higgs quartic couplings, some of which can be significant. The former two can be probed at the HL-LHC, the latter requires a future collider with sufficient energy and precision such as the FCC-hh.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.08811,
  title  = {Vacuum Stability in the Standard Model and Beyond},
  author = {Gudrun Hiller and Tim Höhne and Daniel F. Litim and Tom Steudtner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.08811},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

v2: Numerical typo in SM input fixed and Tab. 1, Figs. 1, 2 and related text corrected, clarifications to App A. added; v3: clarifications added, conclusions unchanged, v4: correlation ellipse corrected in the upper plot of Fig 2, all numerics unchanged

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:18:42.423Z