Impact of new physics on the EW vacuum stability in a curved spacetime background

A bstract It has been recently shown that, contrary to an intuitive decoupling argument, the presence of new physics at very large energy scales (say around the Planck scale) can have a strong impact on the electroweak vacuum lifetime. In particular, the vacuum could be totally destabilized. This st...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The journal of high energy physics 2017-12, Vol.2017 (12), p.1-26, Article 100
Main Authors: Bentivegna, E., Branchina, V., Contino, F., Zappalà, D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Beyond Standard Model
Classical and Quantum Gravitation
Decoupling
Elementary Particles
Gravitation
Higgs Physics
High energy physics
Nonperturbative Effects
Parameterization
Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Quantum Field Theories
Quantum Field Theory
Quantum Physics
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Relativity
Relativity Theory
Solitons Monopoles and Instantons
Spacetime
String Theory
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Summary:A bstract It has been recently shown that, contrary to an intuitive decoupling argument, the presence of new physics at very large energy scales (say around the Planck scale) can have a strong impact on the electroweak vacuum lifetime. In particular, the vacuum could be totally destabilized. This study was performed in a flat spacetime background, and it is important to extend the analysis to curved spacetime since these are Planckian-physics effects. It is generally expected that under these extreme conditions gravity should totally quench the formation of true vacuum bubbles, thus washing out the destabilizing effect of new physics. In this work we extend the analysis to curved spacetime and show that, although gravity pushes toward stabilization, the destabilizing effect of new physics is still (by far) the dominating one. In order to get model independent results, high energy new physics is parametrized in two different independent ways: as higher order operators in the Higgs field, or introducing new particles with very large masses. The destabilizing effect is observed in both cases, hinting at a general mechanism that does not depend on the parametrization details for new physics, thus maintaining the results obtained from the analysis performed in flat spacetime.
ISSN:1029-8479
1029-8479
DOI:10.1007/JHEP12(2017)100