1203.0156 (Oleg Lebedev)

On Stability of the Electroweak Vacuum and the Higgs Portal    [PDF]

Oleg Lebedev

In the Standard Model (SM), the Higgs mass around 125 GeV implies that the electroweak vacuum is metastable since the quartic Higgs coupling turns negative at high energies. I point out that an arbitrarily small mixing of the Higgs with a heavy singlet can make the electroweak vacuum completely stable. This is due to a tree level correction to the Higgs mass, which survives in the zero--mixing/heavy--singlet limit. Such a situation is experimentally indistinguishable from the SM, unless the Higgs self--coupling can be measured. As a result, Higgs inflation and its variants can still be viable.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.0156