Vacuum stability in the Standard Model and beyond

Abstract

We revisit the stability of the Standard Model vacuum and investigate its quantum effective potential using the highest available orders in perturbation theory and the most accurate determination of input parameters to date. We observe that the stability of the electroweak vacuum centrally depends on the values of the top mass and the strong coupling constant. We estimate that reducing their uncertainties by a factor of 2–3 is sufficient to establish or refute Standard Model vacuum stability at the 5σ level. We further investigate vacuum stability for a variety of singlet scalar field extensions with and without flavor using the Higgs portal mechanism. We identify the beyond Standard Model parameter spaces for stability and find sizable room for new physics. We further study the phenomenology of Planck-safe models at colliders and determine the impact on the Higgs trilinear, the Higgs-to-electroweak-boson, and the Higgs quartic couplings, some of which can be significant. The former two can be probed at the HL-LHC; the latter requires a future collider with sufficient energy and precision such as the FCC-hh. Published by the American Physical Society 2024