Vacuum decay in the Standard Model: analytical results with running and gravity

Abstract

A tunneling bounce driving the decay of a metastable vacuum must respect an integral constraint dictated by simple scaling arguments that is very useful to determine key properties of the bounce. After illustrating how this works in a simple toy model, the Standard Model Higgs potential is considered, including quartic coupling running and gravitational corrections as sources of scale invariance breaking. This approach clarifies the existence of the bounce and leads to simple and accurate analytical results in an expansion in the breaking parameters. Using the so-called tunneling-potential approach (generalized for nonminimal coupling to gravity) the integral constraint and the tunneling action are extended to second order in perturbations.