相关论文: Gravity and the stability of the Higgs vacuum
We have recently suggested that tiny black holes can act as nucleation seeds for the decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum. Previous results applied only to the nucleation of thin-wall bubbles, and covered a very small region of parameter…
This talk reviews our recent work showing how tiny black holes can act as nucleation sites for the decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum. We start by discussing the formation of thin wall bubbles of true vacuum inside a false vacuum, and…
We consider the possibility that small black holes can act as nucleation seeds for the decay of a metastable vacuum, focussing particularly on the Higgs potential. Using a thin-wall bubble approximation for the nucleation process, which is…
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…
The Higgs mechanism predicts, apart from the existence of a new scalar boson, the presence of a constant Higgs field that permeates all of space. The vacuum expectation value (VEV) of this field is affected by quantum corrections which are…
Phase transitions are part of everyday life, yet are also believed to be part of the history of our universe, where the nature of particle interactions change as the universe settles into its vacuum state. The discovery of the Higgs, and…
Higgs vacuum stability has important consequences for cosmology. In particular, we argue that if the Higgs vacuum is metastable, then the dark matter cannot contain a single black hole of mass less than $10^{15}{\rm g}$ in our entire past…
In this paper, we discuss the Higgs vacuum stability around evaporating black holes. We provide a new approach to investigate the false vacuum decay around the black hole and clearly show how vacuum fluctuations of the Higgs induce a…
Physics associated with the Higgs field potential is rich and interesting and deserves a concise summary for a broader audience to appreciate the beauty and the challenges of this subject. We discuss the role of the Higgs potential in…
We examine the effect of large extra dimensions on black hole seeded vacuum decay using the Randall-Sundrum model as a prototype for warped extra dimensions. We model the braneworld black hole by a tidal solution, and solve the Higgs…
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…
A new approach to vacuum decay in quantum field theory, based on a simple variational formulation in field space using a tunneling potential, is ideally suited to study the effects of gravity on such decays. The method allows to prove in…
We study the effect of primordial black holes on the classical rate of nucleation of AdS regions within the standard electroweak vacuum. We find that the energy barrier for transitions to the new vacuum, which characterizes the exponential…
The Higgs field is conventionally treated as a small local perturbation atop a large, constant vacuum value that uniformly permeates the universe. I propose instead that in regions of extreme gravitational intensity -- such as near…
The Higgs boson is often compared to a small ripple on a vast, calm ocean. This "ocean" is the universal Higgs vacuum expectation value, about 246 GeV, permeating all space and generating particle masses. Its remarkable uniformity reflects…
It has been recently suggested that small mass black holes (BHs) may become unstable due to quantum-gravitational effects and eventually decay, producing radiation, on a timescale shorter than the Hawking evaporation time. We argue that the…
We pursued the question of the influence of a strong gravitational field on the structure of the Higgs effective potential in the gauge-less top-Higgs sector of the Standard Model with an additional scalar singlet. To this end, we…
A remarkable prediction of the Standard Model is that, in the absence of corrections lifting the energy density, the Higgs potential becomes negative at large field values. If the Higgs field samples this part of the potential during…
Quantum gravity may allow black holes to tunnel into white holes. If so, the lifetime of a black hole could be shorter than the one given by Hawking evaporation, solving the information paradox. More interestingly, this could open to a new…
We explore the consequences of the mass generation due to the Higgs field in strong gravity astrophysical environments. The vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field is predicted to depend on the curvature of spacetime, potentially giving…