Implications of a Higgs Discovery at LEP

Abstract

If the Higgs boson has a mass below 130 GeV, then the standard model vacuum is unstable; if it has a mass below 90 GeV (i.e. within reach of LEP within the next two years), then the instability will occur at a scale between 800 GeV and 10 TeV. We show that precise determinations of the Higgs and top quark masses as well as more detailed effective potentialcalculations will enable one to pin down the location of the instability to an accuracy of about 25 percent. It is often said that ``the standard model must break down'' or ``new physics must enter'' by that scale. However, by considering a toy model for the new physics, we show that the lightest new particle (or resonance) could have a mass as much as an order of magnitude greater than the location of the instability, and still restabilize the vacuum.

11 pages, LaTex, 2 figures appended as uuencoded file (also available by anonymous ftp at ftp://gopher.cc.wm.edu/pub/incoming/higgs1.ps (or higgs2.ps))

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• The effective potential and the renormalisation group
• Improved Higgs Mass Stability Bound in the Standard Model and Implications for Supersymmetry
• IMPROVED METASTABILITY BOUNDS ON THE STANDARD MODEL HIGGS MASS
• Precise Vacuum Stability Bound in the Standard Model
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Cited by in corpus (17)

• Quarks and Leptons Beyond the Third Generation
• Stabilization of the Electroweak Vacuum by a Scalar Threshold Effect
• On the gauge dependence of the Standard Model vacuum instability scale
• Gauge-Independent Scales Related to the Standard Model Vacuum Instability
• Effective operators and vacuum instability as heralds of new physics
• Minimal SU(5) Resuscitated by Long-Lived Quarks and Leptons
• Impact of generalized Yukawa interactions on the lower Higgs mass bound
• Gauge Dependence of Lower Bounds on the Higgs Mass Derived from Electroweak Vacuum Stability Constraints
• Anatomy of the Higgs mass spectrum
• Impact of New Physics on the EW vacuum stability in a curved spacetime background
• The Standard Model instability and the scale of new physics
• Gauge Invariant Higgs mass bounds from the Physical Effective Potential
• Indications from Precision Electroweak Physics Confront Theoretical Bounds on the Mass of the Higgs Boson
• Vacuum Stability Higgs Mass Bound Revisited with Implications for Extra Dimension Theories
• Vacuum Stability in Split Susy and Little Higgs Models
• Gauge Invariant Effective Potentials and Higgs Mass Bounds
• A Possible Reason for $M_H\simeq 126$ GeV