Gravitational corrections to Higgs potentials

• Main Authors: Marios Bounakis, Ian G. Moss
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2018-04-01
• Series: Journal of High Energy Physics
• Subjects: Cosmology of Theories beyond the SM; Effective Field Theories
• Online Access: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP04(2018)071

Abstract Understanding the Higgs potential at large field values corresponding to scales in the range above 1010GeV is important for questions of vacuum stability, particularly in the early universe where survival of the Higgs vacuum can be an issue. In this paper we show that the Higgs potential can be derived in away which is independent of the choice of conformal frame for the spacetime metric. Questions about vacuum stability can therefore be answered unambiguously. We show that frame independence leads to new relations between the beta functions of the theory and we give improved limits on the allowed values of the Higgs curvature coupling for stability.