https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-012-2058-2
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
On stability of the electroweak vacuum and the Higgs portal
DESY Theory Group, Notkestrasse 85, 22607, Hamburg, Germany
* e-mail: oleg.lebedev@cern.ch
Received:
22
May
2012
Revised:
6
June
2012
Published online:
7
July
2012
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.
© Springer-Verlag / Società Italiana di Fisica, 2012
