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 possible when generic quantum gravity corrections are added to the Higgs potential, we show that primordial black holes can stimulate vacuum decay. We demonstrate that for suitable parameter ranges, the vacuum decay process dominates over the Hawking evaporation process. Finally, we comment on the application of these results to vacuum decay seeded by black holes produced in particle collisions.
The current central experimental values of the parameters of the Standard Model give rise to a striking conclusion: metastability of the electroweak vacuum is favoured over absolute stability. A metastable vacuum for the Higgs boson implies that it is possible, and in fact inevitable, that a vacuum decay takes place with catastrophic consequences for the Universe. The metastability of the Higgs vacuum is especially significant for cosmology, because there are many mechanisms that could have triggered the decay of the electroweak vacuum in the early Universe. We present a comprehensive review o…
It is becoming increasingly clear that metastable vacua may play a prominent role in supersymmetry-breaking. To date, however, this idea has been realized only in models where non-perturbative dynamics complicates the analysis of metastability. In this paper, we present a simple construction in which metastable vacua occur classically, i.e., at tree-level, and in which supersymmetry-breaking is sourced by both D-terms and F-terms. All relevant dynamics is perturbative, and hence calculations of vacuum energies and lifetimes can be performed explicitly. Moreover, we find that our construction c…
Current measurements of Standard Model parameters suggest that the electroweak vacuum is metastable. This metastability has important cosmological implications, because large fluctuations in the Higgs field could trigger vacuum decay in the early universe. For the false vacuum to survive, interactions which stabilize the Higgs during inflation -- e.g., inflaton-Higgs interactions or non-minimal couplings to gravity -- are typically necessary. However, the post-inflationary preheating dynamics of these same interactions could also trigger vacuum decay, thereby recreating the problem we sought t…
In a recently proposed Higgs-Seesaw model the observed scale of dark energy results from a metastable false vacuum energy associated with mixing of the standard model Higgs particle and a scalar associated with new physics at the GUT or Planck scale. Here we address the issue of how to ensure metastability of this state over cosmological time. We consider new tree-level operators, the presence of a thermal bath of hidden sector particles, and quantum corrections to the effective potential. We find that in the thermal scenario many additional light degrees of freedom are typically required unle…
We consider the possibility that the gauge hierarchy is a byproduct of the metastability of the electroweak vacuum, i.e., that whatever mechanism is responsible for the latter also sets the running Higgs mass to a value smaller than its natural value by many orders of magnitude. This perspective is motivated by the early-time framework for eternal inflation put forth recently, which favors vacua that are relatively short-lived, but applies more generally to any theoretical approach predicting that our vacuum should be metastable. We find that the metastability of the electroweak vacuum, togeth…
The measurements of the Higgs mass and top Yukawa coupling indicate that we live in a very special Universe, at the edge of the absolute stability of the electroweak vacuum. If fully stable, the Standard Model (SM) can be extended all the way up to the inflationary scale and the Higgs field, non-minimally coupled to gravity with strength $ξ$, can be responsible for inflation. We show that the successful Higgs inflation scenario can also take place if the SM vacuum is not absolutely stable. This conclusion is based on two effects that were overlooked previously. The first one is associated with…
Recent measurements at the LHC suggest that the current Higgs vacuum could be metastable with a modest barrier (height 10^{10-12}{GeV})^{4}) separating it from a ground state with negative vacuum density of order the Planck scale. We note that metastability is problematic for big bang to end one cycle, bounce, and begin the next. In this paper, motivated by the approximate scaling symmetry of the standard model of particle physics and the primordial large-scale structure of the universe, we use our recent formulation of the Weyl-invariant version of the standard model coupled to gravity to tra…
One notoriously difficult problem in perturbative gauge mediation of supersymmetry breaking via messenger fields is the generic presence of a phenomenologically unacceptable vacuum with messenger vevs, with a lower energy than the desired (MSSM) vacuum. We investigate the possibility that quantum corrections promote the latter to the ground state of the theory, and find that this is indeed feasible. For this to happen, the couplings of the messengers to the goldstino superfield must be small, and this implies an additional suppression of the MSSM soft terms with respect to the supersymmetry br…
The global stability of R-charged AdS black holes in a grand canonical ensemble is examined by eliminating the constraints from the action, but without solving the equations of motion, thereby constructing the reduced action of the system. The metastability of the system is found to set in at a critical value of the chemical potential which is conjugate to the R-charge. The relation among the small black hole, large black hole and the instability is discussed. The result is consistent with the metastability found in the AdS/CFT-conjectured dual field theory. The "renormalized" temperature of A…
The possible violation of the conventional lower Higgs mass stability bound by the discovered Higgs boson has far reaching consequences within particle physics and cosmology. We discuss the possibility that nonpolynomial bare interactions seeded at some high-momentum scale can considerably diminish the lower Higgs mass bound without introducing a metastability in the Higgs effective potential. For this, we classify various deformations of the usual quartic bare potential regarding their impact on stable IR physics. We perform the analysis in a large $N_{\mathrm{f}}$ expansion, addressing the c…
We refine and update the metastability constraint on the Standard Model top and Higgs masses, by analytically including gravitational corrections to the vacuum decay rate. Present best-fit ranges of the top and Higgs masses mostly lie in the narrow metastable region. Furthermore, we show that the SM potential can be fine-tuned in order to be made suitable for inflation. However, SM inflation results in a power spectrum of cosmological perturbations not consistent with observations.
Current cosmological data favour inflationary models non-minimally coupled to gravity. In this work we study the implications of the metastability of the electroweak vacuum in this framework. We consider an inflaton field with a non-minimal coupling to Ricci curvature and a portal coupling between the Higgs field and the inflaton and find that the ratio of the two couplings is severely constrained from stability during inflation and reheating dynamics, with constraints becoming more severe for weaker non-minimal coupling as during inflation Higgs fluctuations are amplified by inflationary expa…
Recently it was discovered that the Standard Model vacuum may suffer an essential metastability near the Planck scale. In this regard it makes sense to study in more detail the decay processes of the metastable vacuum and to develop methods for their more accurate analysis. In this article we develop a technique to calculate two loop radiative corrections to false vacuum decay rate in thin-wall approximation and apply it to false vacuum decay in scalar quantum field theory with cubic and quartic interactions. The results obtained use dimensional regularization and given in two different renorm…
Our current measurements of the Standard Model parameters imply that the Higgs field resides in a metastable electroweak vacuum, where the vacuum can decay to a lower ground state, with cataclysmic repercussions for our Universe. According to our observations, no such event has happened in the observable universe, in spite of the various energetic processes that could have triggered it. This work serves as an overview of a method that uses the metastability of the false vacuum during cosmological inflation to provide constraints on the Higgs curvature coupling $ξ$. Considering also the effects…
We study false vacuum decay catalyzed by black holes. We consider a toy two-dimensional model of a scalar field with an unstable potential in the background of a dilaton black hole. A realistic black hole in four dimensions possesses the potential barrier for linear field perturbations. We model this barrier -- the greybody factor -- for spherically-symmetric perturbations in the toy model by adding a coupling between the scalar field and dilaton. We compute analytically the decay rate for the black hole in thermal equilibrium (Hartle-Hawking state) and for the radiating black hole in empty sp…
We construct a black hole whose interior is the false vacuum and whose exterior is the true vacuum of a classical field theory. From the outside the metric is the usual Schwarzschild one, but from the inside the space is de Sitter with a cosmological constant determined by the energy of the false vacuum. The parameters of the field potential may allow for the false vacuum to exist for more than the present age of the universe. A potentially relevant effective field theory within the context of QCD results in a Schwarzschild radius of about 200 km.
We provide a method to calculate the rate of false vacuum decay induced by a black hole. The method uses complex tunneling solutions and consistently takes into account the structure of different quantum vacua in the black hole metric via boundary conditions. The latter are connected to the asymptotic behavior of the time-ordered Green's function in the corresponding vacua. We illustrate the technique on a two-dimensional toy model of a scalar field with inverted Liouville potential in an external background of a dilaton black hole. We analytically derive the exponential suppression of tunneli…
We address the notorious metastability of the standard model (SM) and promote it to a model building task: What are the new ingredients required to stabilize the SM up to the Planck scale without encountering subplanckian Landau poles? Using the SM extended by vector-like fermions (VLFs), we chart out the corresponding landscape of Higgs stability. We find that the gauge portal mechanism, triggered by new SM charge carriers, opens up sizeable room for stability in a minimally invasive manner. We also find models with Higgs criticality, and Yukawa portals opening up at stronger coupling. Severa…
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 gravitational collapse of the vacuum. Furthermore, we point out that the backreaction of the Hawking radiation can not be ignored and the gravitational vacuum decay is exponentially suppressed. However, a large number of the evaporating (or evaporated) primordial black holes threaten the existence of the Universe and we obtain a new upper bound on the evaporating …
We consider a model with a toroidally compactified extra dimension giving rise to a temperature-dependent 4d effective potential with one-loop contributions due to the Casimir effect, along with a 5d cosmological constant. The forms of the effective potential at low and high temperatures indicates a possibility for the formation of a domain wall bubble, formed by the modulus scalar field, surrounding an evaporating black hole. This is viewed as an example of a recently proposed black hole vacuum bubble arising from matter-sourced moduli fields in the vicinity of an evaporating black hole [D. G…
False vacuum decay catalyzed by black hole in a heat bath
Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院理论物理研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；International Centre for Theoretical Physics Asia-Pacific (ICTP-AP)（亚太理论物理国际中心）；Research Center for the Early Universe, The University of Tokyo（东京大学早期宇宙研究中心）；Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics（理论物理 perimeter 研究所）
According to the current experimental data, the Higgs vacuum appears to be metastable due to the development of a second lower ground state in its potential. Consequently, vacuum decay would induce the nucleation of true vacuum bubbles with catastrophic consequences for our Universe and therefore we are motivated to study possible stabilising mechanisms in the early universe. In our latest investigation (2207.00696), we studied the electroweak metastability in the context of the observationally favoured model of Starobinsky inflation. Following the motivation and techniques from our first stud…
With the Higgs mass now measured at the sub-percent level, the potential metastability of the electroweak vacuum of the Standard Model (SM) motivates renewed study of false vacuum decay in quantum field theory. In this note, we describe an approach to calculating quantum corrections to the decay rate of false vacua that is able to account fully and self-consistently for the underlying inhomogeneity of the solitonic tunneling configuration. We show that this method can be applied both to theories in which the instability arises already at the level of the classical potential and those in which …
We investigate a vacuum decay around a spinning seed black hole by using the Israel junction condition and conclude that the spin of black hole would suppress a vacuum decay rate compared to that for a non-spinning case, provided that the surface of vacuum bubble has its ellipsoidal shape characterized by the Kerr geometry. We also find out that in the existence of a near-extremal black hole, a false vacuum state can be more stabilized than the case of the Coleman-de Luccia solution. A few necessary assumptions to carry the calculations are discussed.
We investigate five-dimensional vacuum solutions which represent rotating multi-black holes in asymptotically Kaluza-Klein spacetimes. We show that multi-black holes rotate maximally along extra dimension, and stationary configurations in vacuum are achieved by the balance of the gravitational attraction force and repulsive force caused by the rotations of black holes. We also show that each black hole can have the different topology of the lens space in addition to the spherical topology, and mass of black holes are quantized by the size of extra dimension and horizon topology.
We give an analytical formula for the vacuum polarization of a massless minimally coupled scalar field at the horizon of a rotating black hole with subtracted geometry. This is the first example of an exact, analytical result for a four-dimensional rotating black hole.
We prove the uniqueness theorem for asymptotically flat static vacuum black hole solutions in higher dimensional space-times. We also construct infinitely many non-asymptotically flat regular static black holes on the same spacetime manifold with the same spherical topology.
We compute the vacuum polarization of a massless minimally co pled scalar field in a background given by a black hole with subtracted geometry. Extending previous results for the horizon of rotating black holes with no charge, we obtain an analytical expression for the vacuum polarization that is valid throughout the spacetime and for arbitrary rotation and charge parameters. The vacuum polarization diverges at the inner horizon and the quantum state cannot be extended to the inside of it.
We argue that the rate of Standard Model vacuum or thermal decay seeded by primordial black holes is negligible (because non-perturbatively suppressed by the small quartic Higgs coupling) and independent of the non-minimal coupling of the Higgs to gravity.
We investigate quantum effects on topological black hole space-times within the framework of quantum field theory on curved space-times. Considering a quantum scalar field, we extend a recent mode-sum regularization prescription for the computation of the renormalized vacuum polarization to asymptotically anti-de Sitter black holes with nonspherical event horizon topology. In particular, we calculate the vacuum polarization for a massless, conformally-coupled scalar field on a four-dimensional topological Schwarzschild-anti-de Sitter black hole background, comparing our results with those for …
We study a false vacuum decay in a two-dimensional black hole spacetime background. The decay rate in the case that nucleation site locates at a black hole center has been calculated in the literature. We develop a method for calculating the decay rate of the false vacuum for a generic nucleation site. We find that the decay rate becomes larger when the nucleation site is close to the black hole horizon and coincides with that in Minkowski spacetime when the nucleation site goes to infinity.
False vacuum decay is a key feature in quantum field theories and exhibits a distinct signature in the early Universe cosmology. It has recently been suggested that the false vacuum decay is catalyzed by a black hole (BH), which might cause the catastrophe of the Standard Model Higgs vacuum if primordial BHs are formed in the early Universe. We investigate vacuum phase transition of a scalar field around a radiating BH with taking into account the effect of Hawking radiation. We find that the vacuum decay rate slightly decreases in the presence of the thermal effect since the scalar potential …
We consider extremal black hole solutions to the vacuum Einstein equations in dimensions greater than five. We prove that the near-horizon geometry of any such black hole must possess an SO(2,1) symmetry in a special case where one has an enhanced rotational symmetry group. We construct examples of vacuum near-horizon geometries using the extremal Myers-Perry black holes and boosted Myers-Perry strings. The latter lead to near-horizon geometries of black ring topology, which in odd spacetime dimensions have the correct number rotational symmetries to describe an asymptotically flat black objec…
The greybody factors for spin 1/2 particles in the BTZ black holes are discussed from 2D CFT in bulk-boundary correspondence. It is found that the initial state of spin 1/2 particle in the BTZ black holes can be described by the Poincaré vacuum state in boundary 2D CFT, and the nonlinear coordinate transformation causes the thermalization of the Poincaré vacuum state. For special case, our results for the greybody factors agree with the semiclassical calculation.
We compute the renormalized vacuum polarization for a massless, conformally coupled scalar field on asymptotically anti-de Sitter black hole backgrounds. Mixed (Robin) boundary conditions are applied on the spacetime boundary. We consider black holes with nonspherical event horizon topology as well as spherical event horizons. The quantum scalar field is in the Hartle-Hawking state, and we employ Euclidean methods to calculate the renormalized expectation values. Far from the black hole, we find that the vacuum polarization approaches a finite limit, which is the same for all boundary conditio…
We present a solution to the vacuum Einstein Equations which represents a collapse of a gravitational wave in 5 dimensions. Depending on the focal length of the wave, the collapse results, either in a black string covered by a horizon, or in a naked singularity which can be removed.
WKB approximation methods are applied to the case of a massive scalar field around a 5-dimensional Reissner-Nordström black hole. The divergences are explicitly isolated and the cancellation against the Schwinger-De Witt counter-terms proven. The resulting finite quantity is evaluated for different values of the free parameters, namely the black hole mass and charge, and the scalar field mass. We thus extend our previous results on quantum vacuum polarization effects for uncharged asymptotically flat higher dimensional black holes to electrically charged black holes.
We study the vacuum polarization of a massless minimally coupled scalar field at the horizon of four-charge STU black holes. We compare the results for the standard asymptotically flat black holes and for the black holes obtained in the "subtracted limit", both in the general static case and at the horizon pole for the general rotating case. The original and the subtracted results are identical only in the BPS limit, and have opposite sign in the extremal Kerr limit. We also compute the vacuum polarization on the static solutions that interpolate between both the original and the subtracted ca…
Inhomogeneity of the actual value of the vacuum energy density is considered in a black hole background. We examine the back-reaction of a Schwarzschild black hole to the highly inhomogeneous vacuum density, and argue the fluctuations lead to deviations from general relativity in the near-horizon region. In particular, we found that vacuum fluctuations onto the horizon trigger adiabatic release of quantum information, while vacuum fluctuations in the vicinity of the horizon produce potentially observable metric fluctuations of order the Schwarzschild radius. Consequently, we propose a form of …
Small evaporating black holes were proposed to be dangerous inducing fast decay of the electroweak false vacuum. We observe that the flat-spectrum matter perturbations growing at the post-inflationary matter dominated stage can produce such black holes in a tiny amount which may nevertheless be sufficient to destroy the vacuum in the visible part of the Universe via the induced process. If the decay probability in the vicinity of Planck-mass black holes was of order one as suggested in literature, the absence of such objects in the early Universe would put severe constraints on inflation and s…
Thermal false vacuum decay near black holes is aspherical
Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院核问题研究所）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；Institute for Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, MSU（莫斯科国立大学理论与数学物理研究所）；Faculty of Physics, MSU（莫斯科国立大学物理系）
We propose a new measure for eternal inflation, based on search optimization and first-passage statistics. This work builds on the dynamical selection mechanism for vacua based on search optimization proposed recently by the author and Parrikar. The approach is motivated by the possibility that eternal inflation has unfolded for a finite time much shorter than the exponentially long mixing time for the landscape. The proposed accessibility measure assigns greater weight to vacua that are accessed efficiently under time evolution. It is the analogue of the closeness centrality index widely used…
We explore the connection between the distribution of particles spontaneously produced from an electric field or black hole and the vacuum persistence, twice the imaginary part of the one-loop effective action. Employing the reconstruction conjecture, we find the effective action for the Bose-Einstein or Fermi-Dirac distribution. The Schwinger effect in ${\rm AdS}_2$ is computed via the phase-integral method in the static coordinates. The Hawking radiation and Schwinger effect of a charged black hole is rederived and interpreted via the phase-integral. Finally, we discuss the relation between …
The possibility that new physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) appears only at the Planck scale $M_P$ is often considered. However, it is usually argued that new physics interactions at $M_P$ do not affect the SM stability phase diagram, so the latter is obtained neglecting these terms. According to this diagram, for the current experimental values of the top and Higgs masses, our universe lives in a metastable state (with very long lifetime), near the edge of stability. Contrary to these expectations, however, we show that the stability phase diagram strongly depends on new physics and that,…
The goal of this paper is to extend to higher dimensionality the methods and computations of vacuum polarization effects in black hole spacetimes. We focus our attention on the case of five dimensional Schwarzschild-Tangherlini black holes, for which we adapt the general method initially developed by Candelas and later refined by Anderson and others. We make use of point splitting regularization and of the WKB approximation to extract the divergences occuring in the coincidence limit of the Green function and, after calculating the counter-terms using the Schwinger - De Witt expansion, we expl…
The gravitational collapse of a spherically symmetric massive core of a star in which the fluid component is interacting with a growing vacuum energy density filling a FLRW type geometry with an arbitrary curvature parameter is investigated. The complete set of exact solutions for all values of the free parameters are obtained and the influence of the curvature term on the collapsing time, black hole mass and other physical quantities are also discussed in detail. We show that for the same initial conditions the total black hole mass depends only on the effective matter density parameter (incl…
With the back reaction of the vacuum energy-momentum tensor consistently taken into account, we study static spherically symmetric black-hole-like solutions to the semi-classical Einstein equation. The vacuum energy is assumed to be given by that of 2-dimensional massless scalar fields, as a widely used model in the literature for black holes. The solutions have no horizon. Instead, there is a local minimum in the radius. We consider thin shells as well as incompressible fluid as the matter content of the black-hole-like geometry. The geometry has several interesting features due to the back r…
In this thesis, we explore the possibility to define black hole mass in terms of the Weyl tensor for the entire family of Lovelock-AdS gravity theories. The level of degeneracy $k$ of the corresponding vacuum fixes the number of curvatures that should appear in the energy formula. Therefore, the charge expression which is a polynomial of maximal degree in the curvature, can be consistently truncated to an order $k$ in the Weyl tensor. In particular, for the maximally degenerate case in odd dimensions (Chern-Simons AdS) the expression identically vanishes and the mass must come from the formula…
