The Fate of the Higgs Vacuum

Gregory, Ruth; Moss, Ian

The Fate of the Higgs Vacuum

Gregory, Ruth; Moss, Ian

Authors

Ruth Gregory

Ian Moss

Abstract

This talk reviews our recent work showing how tiny black holes can act as nucleation sites for the decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum [1, 2, 3, 4]. We start by discussing the formation of thin wall bubbles of true vacuum inside a false vacuum, and show how adding a black hole lowers the action of the Euclidean tunneling solution, thus strongly enhancing the probability of vacuum decay. We then review numerical results for the Higgs vacuum showing that the decay rate is even higher for these “thick wall” bubbles. The results imply either tiny black holes are not a component of our universe, or BSM corrections to the Higgs potential must stabilise our vacuum.

Citation

Gregory, R., & Moss, I. (2016). The Fate of the Higgs Vacuum. In 38th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP2016)

Conference Name	38th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP2016)
Conference Location	Chicago, USA
Acceptance Date	Apr 20, 2017
Publication Date	Jan 1, 2016
Deposit Date	Jun 13, 2017
Publicly Available Date	Jun 14, 2017
Volume	2016
Series Title	Proceedings of science
Series ISSN	1824-8039
Book Title	38th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP2016)
Publisher URL	https://pos.sissa.it/archive/conferences/282/344/ICHEP2016_344.pdf

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