Gauge-Independent Scales Related to the Standard Model Vacuum Instability

Abstract

The measured (central) values of the Higgs and top quark masses indicate that the Standard Model (SM) effective potential develops an instability at high field values. The scale of this instability, determined as the Higgs field value at which the potential drops below the electroweak minimum, is about $10^{11}$ GeV. However, such a scale is unphysical as it is not gauge-invariant and suffers from a gauge-fixing uncertainty of up to two orders of magnitude. Subjecting our system, the SM, to several probes of the instability (adding higher order operators to the potential; letting the vacuum decay through critical bubbles; heating up the system to very high temperature; inflating it) and asking in each case physical questions, we are able to provide several gauge-invariant scales related with the Higgs potential instability.

44 pages, 9 figures

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• Electroweak Phase Transition in the $Z_3$-invariant NMSSM: Implications of LHC and Dark matter searches and prospects of detecting the gravitational waves
• False vacuum decay: an introductory review
• Tree-level unitarity in Higgs inflation in the metric and the Palatini formulation
• Higgs Criticality beyond the Standard Model
• Standard Model vacuum decay in a de Sitter Background
• Electroweak Phase Transition in a Right-Handed Neutrino Superfield Extended NMSSM
• On the Cosmological Stability of the Higgs Instability
• Towards a Higgs mass determination in asymptotically safe gravity with a dark portal
• Probing Leptophobic Dark Sectors via Gravitational Wave Signatures
• NNLO corrections to false vacuum decay rate in thin-wall approximation
• A singlet scalar assisted $N_2$ Leptogenesis and Pseudo-Scalar Dark Matter
• Nucleation at finite temperature: a gauge-invariant, perturbative framework