Abstract
We study the instability of the Higgs vacuum caused by a cloud of strings. By catalysis, the decay rate of the vacuum is highly enhanced and, when the energy density of the cloud is larger than the critical value, a semi-classical vacuum decay occurs. We also discuss the relation between the string cloud and observational constraints on the cosmic strings from the viewpoint of the catalysis, which are converted into bounds on the parameters of the Higgs potential.
Highlights
The discovery of the Higgs particle and the precise measurements of the top quark mass seems to reveal that our vacuum, in which the electroweak symmetry breaks down, is metastable [1]
For the catalysis to work in this case, the true vacuum has to be connected to the symmetry restoring point of the potential as emphasized in [4]
We found that the critical value crucially depends on the parameters of Higgs potential
Summary
The discovery of the Higgs particle and the precise measurements of the top quark mass seems to reveal that our vacuum, in which the electroweak symmetry breaks down (we call the Higgs vacuum for short), is metastable [1] This fact has been boosting studies on the Higgs vacuum from various point of views [2]. We study the relation between the cloud of string and cosmological observations by showing how to connect the Higgs potential with the cosmic string tension. Assuming that the string cloud network behaves as the standard scaling cosmic string network, we apply cosmological bounds on the tension to obtain constraints on parameters of the Higgs potential.
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