The FL bound and its phenomenological implications

Abstract

Demanding that charged Nariai black holes in (quasi-)de Sitter space decay without becoming super-extremal implies a lower bound on the masses of charged particles, known as the Festina Lente (FL) bound. In this paper we fix the $$ \mathcal{O}(1) $$ O 1 constant in the bound and elucidate various aspects of it, as well as extensions to d > 4 and to situations with scalar potentials and dilatonic couplings. We also discuss phenomenological implications of FL including an explanation of why the Higgs potential cannot have a local minimum at the origin, thus explaining why the weak force must be broken. For constructions of meta-stable dS involving anti-brane uplift scenarios, even though the throat region is consistent with FL, the bound implies that we cannot have any light charged matter fields coming from any far away region in the compactified geometry, contrary to the fact that they are typically expected to arise in these scenarios. This strongly suggests that introduction of warped anti-branes in the throat cannot be decoupled from the bulk dynamics as is commonly assumed. Finally, we provide some evidence that in certain situations the FL bound can have implications even with gravity decoupled and illustrate this in the context of non-compact throats.

Festina-Lente bound on Higgs vacuum structure and inflation

“…Moreover, the cosmic energy density of the current universe is dominated by dark energy V = Λ DE ∼ 10 −120 M 4 P . These two are consistent with the FL bound as the masses of the charged particles in the SM are all many orders larger than the Hubble scale of the current universe H 0 ∼ O(10 −60 M P ) [19].…”

“…This bound is consistent with the current universe since Λ DE ∼ 10 −120 M 4 P as measured from Planck [33] satisfies the bound, which is noticed earlier in ref. [19]. The validity during inflation will be discussed in detail in section 3.…”

“…In order to avoid the naked singularity, we can impose that the charged Nariai BH in which the BH horizon coincides with the cosmological horizon must discharge without losing sub-extremality. 1 From this, JHEP02(2022)100 one obtains the Festina Lente (FL) bound [18,19]: the mass m for every state of charge q under U(1) gauge invariance with coupling g satisfies…”

“…When c2n with n ≥ 4 are neglected, c6 must be positive for the stability of the Higgs potential 4. More precisely, the background geometry after the charged BH production is required to be deformed close to that of the Nariai BH, dS2×S 2[18,19], which undoubtedly includes the nearly constant cosmological horizon case.…”

Characters, quasinormal modes, and Schwinger pairs in $dS_2$ with flux

“…We note in particular that the scalar mass region in which there is IR hyperconductivity [25] (see Fig. 8) is excluded by the Festina Lente (FL) bound [5,37]. Pair creation, which does not depend on the details of the gravitational collapse [38], is discussed more generally for de Sitter black holes in [28,39].…”