The Cosmological Constant and Stability of the Higgs Vacuum

Abstract

We discuss the cosmological constant puzzle and possible connections to the (meta-)stability of the Higgs vacuum suggested by recent LHC results. A possible explanation involves new critical phenomena in the ultraviolet, close to the Planck scale.

Mirror QCD and Cosmological Constant

“…From Equation (17) one notices that the mQCD gauge field gives a constant vacuum contribution to the energy-momentum tensor in the Einstein equations. Since the QCD and mQCD contributions to the ground-state energy density have opposite signs there is a compelling possibility that they can, in principle, cancel each other at some moment t = t * in the cosmological history provided that mQCD → − QCD (20) in the infrared regime of mQCD. We argue that this relation can be reached at some t = t * around the QCD phase transition epoch as long as the mQCD energy scale Λ mQCD is much larger than that in QCD Λ QCD such that at the cancellation time t * their β-functions have different signs.…”

“…Despite of many DE/CC models existing in the literature, there is not a compelling resolution of the CC problem i.e., why the CC term is small and positive as well as why the CC term is non-zeroth and exists at all (for the existing proposals in connection to the hierarchy and origin problems of the Standard Model (SM) see, e.g., Refs. [19][20][21]). From the Quantum Field Theory (QFT) viewpoint, the ground state energy density of the universe should account for a bulk of various contributions from existing quantum fields at energy scales ranging from the Quantum Gravity (Planck) scale, M PL 1.2 × 10 19 GeV, down to the QCD confinement scale, Λ QCD 0.1 GeV.…”