Cosmological Aspects of Higgs Vacuum Metastability

Abstract

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 of the implications from Higgs vacuum metastability for cosmology along with a pedagogical discussion of the related theoretical topics, including renormalization group improvement, quantum field theory in curved spacetime and vacuum decay in field theory.

67 pages, 9 figures. Final version

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• Gravitational Portals with Non-Minimal Couplings
• Supercooling in Radiative Symmetry Breaking: Theory Extensions, Gravitational Wave Detection and Primordial Black Holes
• Collisions of false-vacuum bubble walls in a quantum spin chain
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• Scalar correlation functions in de Sitter space from the stochastic spectral expansion
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• Progress in Higgs inflation
• Higher-order extension of Starobinsky inflation: initial conditions, slow-roll regime, and reheating phase
• Inflation near a metastable de Sitter vacuum from moduli stabilisation
• Super-slow phase transition catalyzed by BHs and the birth of baby BHs
• Real-time dynamics of false vacuum decay
• Electroweak vacuum decay in metric-affine gravity
• Quantitative Analysis of the Stochastic Approach to Quantum Tunneling
• Black hole induced false vacuum decay: The role of greybody factors
• Model-Independent Radiative Symmetry Breaking and Gravitational Waves
• The Higgs field and early universe cosmology: a (brief) review
• Scalar correlation functions for a double-well potential in de Sitter space
• Neutrino masses, vacuum stability and quantum gravity prediction for the mass of the top quark
• Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter through Higgs Criticality
• Vacuum decay constraints on the Higgs curvature coupling from inflation
• Natural Inflation with non minimal coupling to gravity in $R^2$ gravity under the Palatini formalism
• Renormalisation group improvement in the stochastic formalism
• Gravitational corrections to electroweak vacuum decay: metric vs. Palatini
• Aspects of the negative mode problem in quantum tunneling with gravity
• Higgs stability-bound and fermionic dark matter
• Search for non-resonant Higgs boson pair production in final states with leptons, taus, and photons in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Constraints on non-minimal coupling from quantum cosmology
• Scrutinizing Vacuum Stability in IDM with Type-III Inverse seesaw
• Vacuum Stability in Inert Higgs Doublet Model with Right-handed Neutrinos
• False vacuum decay and nucleation dynamics in neutral atom systems
• Gravitino Dark matter, Non Thermal Leptogenesis and Low reheating temperature in No-scale Higgs Inflation
• Warm inflation with a heavy QCD axion
• Massless Preheating and Electroweak Vacuum Metastability
• Eternal Inflation and Reheating in the Presence of the Standard Model Higgs Field
• Second-order stochastic theory for self-interacting scalar fields in de Sitter spacetime
• Electroweak Symmetry Breaking and WIMP-FIMP Dark Matter
• Destabilization of the EW vacuum in non-minimally coupled inflation
• Free scalar correlators in de Sitter via the stochastic approach beyond slow roll
• When tadpoles matter: One-loop corrections for spectator Higgs in inflation
• Higgs chameleon
• Quantum and Gradient Corrections to False Vacuum Decay on a de Sitter Background
• Particle production and hadronization temperature in the massive Schwinger model
• Gravitational waves from the vacuum decay with LISA
• On the Cosmological Stability of the Higgs Instability
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• Can dark matter drive electroweak symmetry breaking?
• Modified Starobinsky inflation by the $R\ln \left(\square \right)R$ term
• Study of Higgs boson pair production in the $HH\to b\overline{b}\gamma \gamma$ final state with 308 fb${}^{-1}$ of data collected at $\sqrt{s}=$ 13 TeV and 13.6 TeV by the ATLAS experiment
• Gravitational waves from a curvature-induced phase transition of a Higgs-portal dark matter sector
• A universe born in a metastable false vacuum state needs not die
• Constraints on Inflaton Higgs Field Couplings
• On the cosmological implications of the electroweak vacuum instability: constraining the non-minimal coupling with inflation
• Two interacting scalars system in curved spacetime -- vacuum stability from the curved spacetime Effective Field Theory (cEFT) perspective
• Second resonance of the Higgs field: motivations, experimental signals, unitarity constraints
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• Curvature perturbations from vacuum transition during inflation
• Higgs vacuum metastability in $R+R^2$ gravity
• Exact solutions for Vacuum Decay in Unbounded Potentials
• Cosmology from Strong Interactions
• The Boring Monopole
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• Higgstory repeats itself
• Scalar field effective potentials in de Sitter spacetime