Abstract
We have recently suggested that tiny black holes can act as nucleation seeds for the decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum. Previous results applied only to the nucleation of thin-wall bubbles, and covered a very small region of parameter space. This paper considers bubbles of arbitrary profile and reaches the same conclusion: black holes seed rapid vacuum decay. Seeded and unseeded nucleation rates are compared, and the gravitational back reaction of the bubbles is taken into account. The evolution of the bubble interior is described for the unseeded nucleation. Results are presented for the renormalisation group improved Standard Model Higgs potential, and a simple effective model representing new physics.
Highlights
We have shown that our previous result that black holes seed vacuum decay is extremely robust to the parameters of the Higgs potential
We used an analytic fit to the Higgs potential and explored a range of parameter space beyond that of the Standard Model
Whereas our previous results applied only to the nucleation of thin-wall bubbles and covered a very small region of parameter space, these new results apply for any bubble wall profile and show that black holes are very effective seeds for vacuum decay
Summary
The precise high energy effective potential for the Higgs field has been determined by a two-loop calculation in the context of the standard model [5, 33, 35, 36]. Since the value of λeff at energies around the Higgs mass is accessible to experimental particle physics, we can fix λeff at the lower end of the range with some confidence. This leaves two fitting parameters, λ∗ and b. It is easier to see how sensitive (or robust) our conclusions are to the shape of the potential
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