We discuss the Higgs mass and cosmological constant hierarchy puzzles with emphasis on the interplay of Poincare invariance, mass generation and renormalization group invariance. A plausible explanation involves an emergent Standard Model with the cosmological constant scale suppressed by power of the large scale of emergence. In this scenario the cosmological constant scale and neutrino masses should be of similar size.
Current measurements of the Higgs boson mass and top Yukawa coupling suggest that the effective Higgs potential develops an instability below the Planck scale. If the energy scale of inflation is as high as the GUT scale, inflationary quantum fluctuations of the Higgs field can easily destabilize the standard electroweak vacuum and produce a lot of AdS domains. This destabilization during inflation can be avoided if a relatively large nonminimal Higgs-gravity or inflaton-Higgs coupling is introduced. Such couplings generate a large effective mass term for the Higgs, which can raise the effecti…
The cosmological Higgs vacuum stability has been an attractive research subject and it is crucial to accurately follow the development of the Higgs fluctuations. In this work, we thoroughly investigate how the vacuum fluctuations of the Higgs field affect the stability of the electroweak vacuum in Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) background. Adopting adiabatic (WKB) approximation or adiabatic regularization methods, we clearly show that vacuum fluctuations of the Higgs field in the FLRW background depend on the curvature and also masses of the Higgs or other scalar fields. The Higgs …
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 …
In this work, we investigated the electroweak vacuum instability during or after inflation. In the inflationary Universe, i.e., de Sitter space, the vacuum field fluctuations $\left< {δϕ}^{ 2 } \right>$ enlarge in proportion to the Hubble scale $H^{2}$. Therefore, the large inflationary vacuum fluctuations of the Higgs field $\left< {δϕ}^{ 2 } \right>$ are potentially catastrophic to trigger the vacuum transition to the negative-energy Planck-scale vacuum state and cause an immediate collapse of the Universe. However, the vacuum field fluctuations $\left< {δϕ}^{ 2 } \right>$, i.e., the vacuum …
The recently suggested Festina-Lente (FL) bound provides a lower bound on the masses of ${\rm U(1)}$ charged particles in terms of the positive vacuum energy. Since the charged particle masses in the Standard Model (SM) are generated by the Higgs mechanism, the FL bound provides a testbed of consistent Higgs potentials in the current dark energy-dominated universe as well as during inflation. We study the implications of the FL bound on the UV behavior of the Higgs potential for a miniscule vacuum energy, as in the current universe. We also present values of the Hubble parameter and the Higgs …
We discuss the cosmological constant puzzle and possible connections to the (meta-)stability of the Higgs vacuum suggested by recent LHC results. A possible explanation involves new critical phenomena in the ultraviolet, close to the Planck scale.
We investigate the possibility of using the only known fundamental scalar, the Higgs, as an inflaton with minimal coupling to gravity. The peculiar appearance of a plateau or a false vacuum in the renormalised effective scalar potential suggests that the Higgs might drive inflation. For the case of a false vacuum we use an additional singlet scalar field, motivated by the strong CP problem, and its coupling to the Higgs to lift the barrier allowing for a graceful exit from inflation by mimicking hybrid inflation. We find that this scenario is incompatible with current measurements of the Higgs…
The abundance of the QCD axion is known to be suppressed if the Hubble parameter during inflation, $H_{\rm inf}$, is lower than the QCD scale, and if the inflation lasts sufficiently long. We show that the tight upper bound on the inflation scale can be significantly relaxed if the eternal old inflation is driven by the standard-model Higgs field trapped in a false vacuum at large field values. Specifically, $H_{\rm inf}$ can be larger than $100\,$GeV if the false vacuum is located above the intermediate scale. We also discuss the slow-roll inflation after the tunneling from the false vacuum t…
The recent discovery of a Higgs-like boson at the LHC with a mass of 126 GeV has revived the interest in supersymmetric models, which predicted a Higgs boson mass below 130 GeV long before its discovery. We compare systematically the allowed parameter space in the constrained Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (CMSSM) and the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Model (NMSSM) by minimizing the chi^2 function with respect to all known constraints from accelerators and cosmology using GUT scale parameters. For the CMSSM the Higgs boson mass at tree level is below the Z^0 boson mass and large radiat…
The Higgs-inflaton coupling plays an important role in the Higgs field dynamics in the early Universe. Even a tiny coupling generated at loop level can have a dramatic effect on the fate of the electroweak vacuum. Such Higgs-inflaton interaction is present both at the trilinear and quartic levels in realistic reheating models. In this work, we examine the Higgs dynamics during the preheating epoch, focusing on the effects of the parametric and tachyonic resonances. We use lattice simulations and other numerical tools in our studies. We find that the resonances can induce large fluctuations of …
Our electroweak vacuum may be metastable in light of the current experimental data of the Higgs/top quark mass. If this is really the case, high-scale inflation models require a stabilization mechanism of our vacuum during inflation. A possible candidate is the Higgs-inflaton/-curvature coupling because it induces an additional mass term to the Higgs during the slow roll regime. However, after the inflation, the additional mass term oscillates, and it can potentially destabilize our electroweak vacuum via production of large Higgs fluctuations during the inflaton oscillation era. In this paper…
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…
The quartic and trilinear Higgs field couplings to an additional real scalar are renormalizable, gauge and Lorentz invariant. Thus, on general grounds, one expects such couplings between the Higgs and an inflaton in quantum field theory. In particular, the (often omitted) trilinear coupling is motivated by the need for reheating the Universe after inflation, whereby the inflaton decays into the Standard Model (SM) particles. Such a coupling necessarily leads to the Higgs-inflaton mixing, which could stabilize the electroweak vacuum by increasing the Higgs self-coupling. We find that the inflat…
We discuss the effect of gravitational interactions on the lifetime of the Higgs vacuum where generic quantum gravity corrections are taken into account. We show how small black holes can act as seeds for vacuum decay, spontaneously nucleating a new Higgs phase centered on the black hole with a lifetime measured in millions of Planck times rather than billions of years. The constraints on parameter space of corrections to the Higgs potential are outlined, and implications for collider black holes discussed.
Some recollections on the recent history of the concepts of vacuum and mass and the search for higgs. According to the widely spread terminology the Higgs field permeates vacuum and serves as the origin of masses of all fundamental particles including the Higgs Boson -- the higgs.
Pseudoscalar and charged Higgs bosons production in the processes $μ^+ μ^-\to P^0_i Z^0$, $μ^+μ^- \to H^{\pm}W^{\mp}$ within the models with several Higgs doublets and singlets is considered.
In the Standard Model (SM), the Higgs mass around 125 GeV implies that the electroweak vacuum is metastable since the quartic Higgs coupling turns negative at high energies. I point out that a tiny mixing of the Higgs with a heavy singlet can make the electroweak vacuum completely stable. This is due to a tree level correction to the Higgs mass-coupling relation, which survives in the zero-mixing/heavy-singlet limit. Such a situation is experimentally indistinguishable from the SM, unless the Higgs self-coupling can be measured. As a result, Higgs inflation and its variants can still be viable…
Theoretical overview on phenomenology of Higgs boson and SUSY Higgs boson at a future linear collider experiment is given as a Higgs and SUSY Higgs working group summary report for LCWS 2000.
We explore the possibility of distinguishing the SM-like MSSM Higgs boson from the SM Higgs boson via Higgs boson pair production at future muon collider. We study the behavior of the production cross section in SM and MSSM with Higgs boson mass for various choices of MSSM parameters tan βand m\sub A. We observe that at fixed CM energy, in the SM, the total cross section increases with the increase in Higgs boson mass whereas this trend is reversed for the MSSM case. The changes that occur for the MSSM case in comparison to the SM predictions are quantified in terms of the relative percentage …
A neutrinophilic Higgs model has tiny vacuum expectation value (VEV), which can naturally explain tiny masses of neutrinos. There is a large energy scale hierarchy between a VEV of the neutrinophilic Higgs doublet and that of usual standard model-like Higgs doublet. In this paper we at first analyze vacuum structures of Higgs potential in both supersymmetry (SUSY) and non-SUSY neutrinophilic Higgs models, and next investigate a stability of this VEV hierarchy against radiative corrections. We will show that the VEV hierarchy is stable against radiative corrections in both Dirac neutrino and Ma…
We have recently suggested that tiny black holes can act as nucleation seeds for the decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum. Previous results applied only to the nucleation of thin-wall bubbles, and covered a very small region of parameter space. This paper considers bubbles of arbitrary profile and reaches the same conclusion: black holes seed rapid vacuum decay. Seeded and unseeded nucleation rates are compared, and the gravitational back reaction of the bubbles is taken into account. The evolution of the bubble interior is described for the unseeded nucleation. Results are presented for the r…
We develop the formalism for computing gravitational corrections to vacuum decay from de Sitter space as a sub-Planckian perturbative expansion. Non-minimal coupling to gravity can be encoded in an effective potential. The Coleman bounce continuously deforms into the Hawking-Moss bounce, until they coincide for a critical value of the Hubble constant. As an application, we reconsider the decay of the electroweak Higgs vacuum during inflation. Our vacuum decay computation reproduces and improves bounds on the maximal inflationary Hubble scale previously computed through statistical techniques.
Using a physical renormalisation scheme we derive mass-dependent renormalisation group equations for the running of the Higgs quartic coupling within the Standard Model. Subsequently, we accurately take into account weak scale thresholds, resulting in a reduction of the error in the determination of the maximum $M_t$ required for absolute stability of the vacuum to 0.28 GeV. For the first time, we conclusively establish the fate of the electroweak vacuum, finding that absolute stability of the Higgs vacuum state is excluded at 99.98% C.L. We also discuss the consequences when this new result i…
With the LHC discovery of a 125 GeV Higgs-like boson, we study gravitational interaction of the Higgs boson via the unique dimension-4 operator involving Higgs doublet and scalar curvature, $\,ξH^†H R\,$, with nonminimal coupling $\,ξ\,$. This Higgs portal term can be transformed away in Einstein frame and induces gauge-invariant effective interactions in the Higgs sector. We study the weak boson scattering in Einstein frame, and explicitly demonstrate the longitudinal-Goldstone boson equivalence theorem in the presence of $\,ξ\,$ coupling. With these, we derive unitarity bound on the Higgs gr…
The influence of the QCD structure of the weak bosons on the Higgs boson production in $e$-$p$ scattering is studied. The energy and Higgs boson mass dependence of the cross-section, following from the new contributions, is calculated.
The presence of charged Higgs bosons is a generic prediction of multiplet extensions of the Standard Model (SM) Higgs sector. Focusing on the Two-Higgs-Doublet-Model (2HDM), we discuss the charged Higgs boson collider phenomenology in the theoretically and experimentally viable parameter space. While almost all existing experimental searches at the LHC target the fermionic decays of charged Higgs bosons, we point out that the bosonic decay channels -- especially the decay into a non-SM-like Higgs boson and a $W$ boson -- often dominate over the fermionic channels. Moreover, we revisit two genu…
We study vacuum stability of B-L extension of the Standard Model (SM) and its supersymmetric version. We show that the generation of non-vanishing neutrino masses through TeV inverse seesaw mechanism leads to a cutoff scale of SM Higgs potential stability of order 10^5 GeV. However, in the non-supersymmetric B-L model, we find that the mixing between the SM-like Higgs and the B-L Higgs plays a crucial role in alleviating the vacuum stability problem. We also provide the constraints of stabilizing the Higgs potential in the supersymmetric B-L model.
Compared with the MSSM or the NMSSM with a low λ, λ-SUSY theory with a large λaround one has been deemed as a most natural realization of NMSSM. In this work, we treat the next-to-lightest CP-even Higgs boson as the SM-like Higgs boson in λ-SUSY and study the properties of the Higgs bosons and the pair production of the SM-like Higgs boson by considering various experiment constraints. We find that naturalness plays an important role in selecting the parameter space of λ-SUSY. In the most natural region of parameter space, the triple self coupling of the SM-like Higgs boson compared with its S…
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 discuss the vacuum energy density term resulting from the spontaneous breakdown of the electroweak gauge symmetry, in the Higgs Mechanism. We alternatively expand the scalar field at one of the degenerate states that lie outside the circle of minimum, such that the Higgs Potential becomes free of any constant field term, and describes a true vacuum. We show that this true vacuum requires a slightly smaller quartic coupling, if the same $v$ and $m_H$ values of the electroweak model are imposed. We propose that this small difference (exactly 20 percent) can be utilized as a test to distinguis…
We show that the vacuum structure of a generic multi-Higgs-doublet model shares several important features with the vacuum structure of the two and three Higgs-doublet model. In particular, one can still define the usual charge breaking, spontaneous CP breaking and normal (charge and CP preserving) stationary points. We analyse the possibility of charge or spontaneous CP breaking, by studying the relative depth of the potential in each of the possible stationary points.
We study the stability of the effective higgs potential in the split supersymmetry and Little Higgs models. In particular, we study the effects of higher dimensional operators in the effective potential on the higgs mass predictions. We find that the size and sign of the higher dimensional operators can significantly change the higgs mass required to maintain vacuum stability in Split Susy models. In the Little Higgs models the effects of higher dimensional operators can be large because of a relatively lower cut-off scale. Working with a specific model we find that a contribution from the hig…
The left-right twin Higgs(LRTH) model predicts the existence of three additional Higgs bosons: one neutral Higgs $ϕ^{0}$ and a pair of charged Higgs bosons $ϕ^{\pm}$. In this paper, we studied the production of a pair of charged and neutral Higgs bosons associated with standard model gauge boson $Z$ at the ILC, i.e., $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow Zϕ^{+}ϕ^{-}$ and $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow Zϕ^{0}ϕ^{0}$. We calculate the production rate and present the distributions of the various observables, such as, the distributions of the energy and the transverse momenta of final $Z$-boson and charged Higgs boson $ϕ…
Searches for charged Higgs bosons are an integral part of current and future investigations at the LHC. The LHC Higgs Cross Section Working Group (LHCHXSWG) was created to provide cross sections, branching ratios, analysis strategies etc. for Higgs boson searches at the LHC. We briefly review progress and results for charged Higgs bosons in and for the LHCHXSWG.
The total cross section for Higgs boson production via the dominant gluon fusion mechanism including NLO [two-loop] QCD corrections can be calculated numerically with the program HIGLU. The QCD corrections are included for arbitrary Higgs and quark masses and increase the cross section at the LHC by up to a factor of 2. The source code HIGLU provides the evaluation of the production of the Standard Model [SM] Higgs boson as well as the neutral Higgs bosons of the minimal supersymmetric extension [MSSM]. The program HDECAY determines the decay widths and branching ratios of the Higgs bosons wit…
We consider the two-Higgs-doublet model with explicit CP-violation, where the effective Higgs potential is not CP-invariant at the tree-level. Three neutral Higgs bosons of the model are the mixtures of CP-even and CP-odd bosons which exist in the CP-conserving limit of the theory. The mass spectrum and tree-level couplings of the neutral Higgs bosons to gauge bosons and fermions are significantly dependent on the parameters of the Higgs boson mixing matrix. We calculate the Higgs-gauge boson, Higgs-fermion, triple and quartic Higgs self-interactions in the MSSM with explicit CP-violation in t…
In the case of minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model (MSSM), when the pseudoscalar Higgs boson mass is less than the supersymmetry energy scale, the effective theory at the electroweak scale is a two-Higgs-doublet model. We diagonalize the mass matrix of the general two-Higgs-doublet model, expressing Higgs boson self-couplings in terms of two mixing angles and four Higgs boson masses, and derive in a compact form the complete set of Feynman rules, including quartic couplings in the Higgs sector, for the case of CP-violating potential. Some processes of double and triple Higgs…
This paper has been withdrawn by the authors, because the authors have second thought that the new ideas in this paper are better to be contained in another paper.
We study an upper bound on masses of additional scalar bosons from the electroweak precision data and theoretical constraints such as perturbative unitarity and vacuum stability in the two Higgs doublet model taking account of recent Higgs boson search results. If the mass of the Standard-Model-like Higgs boson is rather heavy and is outside the allowed region by the electroweak precision data, such a discrepancy should be compensated by contributions from the additional scalar bosons. We show the upper bound on masses of the additional scalar bosons to be about 2 $(1)$ TeV for the mass of the…
We consider the triple coupling of the Higgs boson in the context of the gauge-Higgs unification scenario. We show that the triple coupling of the Higgs boson in this scenario generically deviates from SM prediction since the Higgs potential in this scenario has a periodicity. We calculate the coupling in the five-dimensional $SU(3)$ x $U(1)_X$ gauge-Higgs unification model and obtain 70% deviation from the SM prediction.
We take the standard model to be an effective theory including higher dimensional operators suppressed by scale $Λ$ and re-examine the higgs mass bounds from the requirements of vacuum stability. Our results show that the effects of the higher dimensional operators on the higgs mass limits are significant. As an implication of our results, we study the vacuum stability higgs mass bounds in theories with extra dimensions.
We explain the current excess seen at the Large Hadron Collider via the $gg\to H\toγγ$ channel in the search for a neutral Higgs boson in terms of both singly (marginally) and doubly (predominantly) charged Higgs bosons predicted by the Higgs Triplet Model.
We show that it is possible to construct models in which the width of the Higgs boson is arbitrary - either smaller or larger than a standard model Higgs boson of the same mass. There are no new fields into which the Higgs boson decays. Instead, the coupling of the Higgs boson to the gauge bosons is adjusted. We construct and analyze weakly--coupled models with arbitrary--width Higgs bosons to investigate the phenomenology one might find in a strongly interacting model. In any such model new physics must enter at a mass scale which decreases as the Higgs boson width is adjusted away from its s…
We study vacuum stability of supersymmetric extended Higgs sectors with a discrete $Z_2$ symmetry. These models may be able to explain dark matter, neutrino masses, baryon asymmetry of the Universe and hierarchy problem simultaneously at the TeV scale. This $Z_2$ symmetry could be broken spontaneously. We examine the stability of the $Z_2$ symmetric vacuum at the tree level in several models with such extended Higgs sectors.
This talk reviews our recent work showing how tiny black holes can act as nucleation sites for the decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum. 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 correct…
We consider the measurement of the trilinear couplings of the neutral Higgs bosons in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model~(MSSM) at a high energy $e^+ e^-$ linear collider in the light of the discovery of a Higgs boson at the CERN Large Hadron Collider~(LHC). We identify the state observed at the LHC with the lightest Higgs boson~($h^0$) of the MSSM, and impose the constraints following from this identification, as well as other experimental constraints on the MSSM parameter space. In order to measure trilinear neutral Higgs couplings, we consider different processes where the heavier Hi…
The Higgs boson mass problem is considered in the next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model for the case of the spontaneous CP violation. The renormalization group equations for the gauge, Yukawa and scalar coupling constants, the effective Higgs potential and lower experimental bounds on Higgs boson and chargino masses are analyzed. The restrictions on the Higgs boson masses are found.
The scalar potential of the two-Higgs-doublet model (2HDM) may have more than one local minimum and the usually considered vacuum could be located at one of them that could decay to another. This paper studies the condition that the usually considered vacuum is the global minimum which, combined with the bounded-from-below condition, will stabilize the vacuum at tree-level. We further apply these conditions to a specific 2HDM and obtain new constraints which could be important in phenomenological studies.
We study the stability of the Electroweak (EW) vacuum in a scale-invariant extension of the Standard Model and General Relativity, known as a Higgs-Dilaton theory. The safety of the EW vacuum against possible transition towards another vacuum is a necessary condition for the model to be phenomenologically acceptable. We find that, within a wide range of parameters of the theory, the decay rate is significantly suppressed compared to that of the Standard Model. We also discuss properties of a tunneling solution that are specific to the Higgs-Dilaton theory.
We show that radiative corrections to the Higgs potential in supersymmetric theories with large tan beta generically lead to large differences in the light Higgs boson decay branching fractions compared to those of the standard model Higgs boson. In contrast, the light Higgs boson production rates are largely unaffected. We identify W h associated production followed by Higgs boson decays to photons or to leptons via W W* as potential experimental probes of these theories.
We present a next-to-leading order calculation of Higgs boson production in vector-boson fusion processes interfaced to shower Monte Carlo programs, implemented according to the POWHEG method.
It is proposed to replace the Higgs boson of the standard model by a Lorentz- and gauge-invariant combination of SU(2) gauge bosons. A pair of Higgs bosons is identified with pairs of gauge bosons by setting their mass Lagrangians equal to each other. That immediately determines the mass of the composite Higgs boson. It becomes simply half of the vacuum expectation value of the standard Higgs boson, which matches the observed mass with tree-level accuracy (2%). The two parameters of the standard Higgs potential are replaced by five one-loop self-interactions of the SU(2) gauge bosons, derived …
The leading $m_H$ radiative correction to the Higgs decay width into a pair of weak vector bosons is calculated at the two--loop level, using the equivalence theorem in Landau gauge. The result indicates the breakdown of perturbation theory if the Higgs boson is heavier than $\sim 930$ GeV, in spite of the smallness of the one--loop radiative correction.
We study the decays of Higgs bosons to a lighter Higgs boson and a virtual gauge boson in the context of the non-supersymmetric Two-Higgs-Doublet-Model (2HDM). We consider the phenomenological impact at LEP2 and find that such decays, when open, may be dominant in regions of parameter space and thus affect current Higgs boson search techniques. Three-body decays would be a way of producing light neutral Higgs bosons which have so far escaped detection at LEP due to suppressed couplings to the $Z$, and are of particular importance in the 2HDM (Model I) which allows both a light fermiophobic Hig…
