The top quark and Higgs boson masses and the stability of the electroweak vacuum

By S. Alekhin, Abdelhak Djouadi, Sven-Olaf Moch. 2012

424 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The ATLAS and CMS experiments observed a particle at the LHC with a mass ≈ 126 GeV , which is compatible with the Higgs boson of the Standard Model. A crucial question is, if for such a Higgs mass value, one could extrapolate the model up to high scales while keeping the minimum of the scalar potential that breaks the electroweak symmetry stable. Vacuum stability requires indeed the Higgs boson mass to be M H ≳ 129 ± 1 GeV , but the precise value depends critically on the input top quark pole mass which is usually taken to be the one measured at the Tevatron, m t exp = 173.2 ± 0.9 GeV . However, for an unambiguous and theoretically well-defined determination of the top quark mass one should rather use the total cross section for top quark pair production at hadron colliders. Confronting the latest predictions of the inclusive p p ¯ → t t ¯ + X cross section up to next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD to the experimental measurement at the Tevatron, we determine the running mass in the MS ¯ -scheme to be m t MS ¯ ( m t ) = 163.3 ± 2.7 GeV which gives a top quark pole mass of m t pole = 173.3 ± 2.8 GeV . This leads to the vacuum stability constraint M H ⩾ 129.4 ± 5.6 GeV to which a ≈ 126 GeV Higgs boson complies as the uncertainty is large. A very precise assessment of the stability of the electroweak vacuum can only be made at a future high-energy electron–positron collider, where the top quark pole mass could be determined with a few hundred MeV accuracy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed72b10ad54423ba30e00fd660bdd241a1db369d

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Citations in the corpus

The cosmological Higgstory of the vacuum instability (2015, background): “the edge between stability and instability of the electroweak vacuum [1–3] (see [4–13] for earlier analyses).”
Higgs inflation from Standard Model criticality (2014, background): “64 GeV [91] is mere a parameter in a Monte Carlo simulation code [7, 92], so called the Pythia mass [93], whose relation to the pole mass is not clear.”
Investigating the near-criticality of the Higgs boson (2013, background): “The discovery of the SM near-criticality has led to many theoretical speculations [8, 31–55, 120, 121].”
Electroweak precision observables, new physics and the nature of a 126 GeV Higgs boson (2013, background): “from the measurement of the tt̄ production cross-section [37].”
Three-loop β-functions for top-Yukawa and the Higgs self-interaction in the standard model (2012, result): “More elaborated analyses of the vacuum stability which take into account the three-loop running as obtained here and two-loop matching corrections can be found in recent works [50–53].”
Constraints on CP-violating Higgs couplings to the third generation (2013, neutral): “3 GeV [29] and Mh = 126 GeV.”
The Phenomenology of Right Handed Neutrinos (2013, background): “We also do not discuss the issue of vacuum stability, which seems inconclusive at this stage due to uncertainties in the top mass [14–18].”