The cosmological Higgstory of the vacuum instability

By J. Espinosa, G. Giudice, Enrico Morgante, A. Riotto, L. Senatore, Alessandro Strumia, N. Tetradis. 2015

236 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A bstractThe Standard Model Higgs potential becomes unstable at large field values. After clarifying the issue of gauge dependence of the effective potential, we study the cosmological evolution of the Higgs field in presence of this instability throughout inflation, reheating and the present epoch. We conclude that anti-de Sitter patches in which the Higgs field lies at its true vacuum are lethal for our universe. From this result, we derive upper bounds on the Hubble constant during inflation, which depend on the reheating temperature and on the Higgs coupling to the scalar curvature or to the inflaton. Finally we study how a speculative link between Higgs meta-stability and consistence of quantum gravity leads to a sharp prediction for the Higgs and top masses, which is consistent with measured values.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef1ccea757e6910af1dacdc820f5ad8730376839

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. Redondo
2. A. Ringwald
3. S. Rasanen
4. J. Espinosa
5. A. Riotto
6. G. Ballesteros
7. P. Wahlman
8. C. Tamarit

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. J. Redondo
2. A. Ringwald
3. S. Rasanen
4. J. Espinosa
5. G. Ballesteros
6. C. Tamarit
7. A. Riotto
8. P. Wahlman

Citations in the corpus

• A cosmological signature of the SM Higgs instability: gravitational waves (2018, background): “This happens because, thanks to the thermal interactions with the surrounding plasma, the Higgs potential is corrected to the form [34] VT ' 1 2 m(2)Th 2 c , m 2 T ' 0.”
• Higgs inflation with loop corrections in the Palatini formulation (2017, background): “As derivatives of the potential are small in slow-roll inflation, gauge-dependence is small, particularly for inflation near an extremum [2, 4, 6, 106].”
• Standard Model—axion—seesaw—Higgs portal inflation. Five problems of particle physics and cosmology solved in one stroke (2016, background): “For instance, sufficiently large non-minimal couplings to gravity can protect from such instabilities [133,141,142], allowing the construction of models in which large-field instabilities do not spoil the cosmological evolution of the scalar fields.”
• Dark matter and neutrino masses from a scale-invariant multi-Higgs portal (2015, background): “1285 [19,20], leads to negative values for the Higgs self-coupling λ(μ) above scales of O(1010 GeV) which means the vacuum is actually metastable [21–31].”