Festina-Lente Bound on Higgs Vacuum Structure and Inflation

Abstract

The recently suggested Festina-Lente (FL) bound provides a lower bound on the masses of U(1) charged particles in terms of the positive vacuum energy. Since the charged particle masses in the Standard Model (SM) are generated by the Higgs mechanism, the FL bound provides a testbed of consistent Higgs potentials in the current dark energydominated universe as well as during inflation. We study the implications of the FL bound on the UV behavior of the Higgs potential for a miniscule vacuum energy, as in the current universe. We also present values of the Hubble parameter and the Higgs vacuum expectation value allowed by the FL bound during inflation, which implies that the Higgs cannot stay at the electroweak scale during this epoch.

Black hole production, eternal inflation, and information in quasi-de Sitter space

“…Finally, we also note that even though the black hole is not produced from the frozen quantum fluctuations, it can be formed by the dynamic process like the collapse of the star. For the charged black hole in dS space, imposing the absence of the naked singularity during its decay gives the conjectured bound on the charged particle mass [83,84,85]. In this way, we expect that the evolution of black hole in (quasi-)dS space may contain some specific aspects of quantum gravity.…”

De Sitter, gravitino mass and the swampland

“…This is the so called "Festina Lente" bound introduced in [85] and explored further e.g. in [86][87][88][89][90]. By studying de Sitter critical points in gauged supergravity, we noticed systematically that when the condition (3.45) is violated for the gravitino, then the de Sitter background is in tension with the magnetic WGC.…”