Connecting the Higgs potential and primordial black holes

Dai, De-Chang; Gregory, Ruth; Stojkovic, Dejan

doi:10.1103/physrevd.101.125012

Connecting the Higgs potential and primordial black holes

Dai, De-Chang; Gregory, Ruth; Stojkovic, Dejan

Authors

De-Chang Dai

Ruth Gregory

Dejan Stojkovic

Abstract

It was recently demonstrated that 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 × 1014 g at formation would have evaporated by now, and in the absence of new physics beyond the standard model, would therefore have entered the mass range in which seeded decay occurs, however, such true vacuum bubbles must percolate in order to completely destroy the false vacuum; this depends on the bubble number density and the rate of expansion of the universe. Here, we compute the fraction of the universe that has decayed to the true vacuum as a function of the formation temperature (or equivalently, mass) of the primordial black holes, and the spectral index of the fluctuations responsible for their formation. This allows us to constrain the mass spectrum of primordial black holes given a particular Higgs potential and conversely, should we discover primordial black holes of definite mass, we can constrain the Higgs potential parameters.

Citation

Dai, D., Gregory, R., & Stojkovic, D. (2020). Connecting the Higgs potential and primordial black holes. Physical Review D, 101(12), Article 125012. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.101.125012

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jun 3, 2020
Online Publication Date	Jun 15, 2020
Publication Date	2020-06
Deposit Date	Jun 16, 2020
Publicly Available Date	Jun 16, 2020
Journal	Physical Review D
Print ISSN	2470-0010
Electronic ISSN	2470-0029
Publisher	American Physical Society
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	101
Issue	12
Article Number	125012
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.101.125012

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