2012/03/31 by Oleg Lebedev · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-012-2058-2
12 pages, 3 figures; clarifying comments added
arxiv created 2012/05/22 · arxiv updated 2015/06/04
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.