Gravitational corrections to Standard Model vacuum decay

TL;DR

This paper refines the Standard Model vacuum decay analysis by analytically incorporating gravitational effects, showing most current mass ranges are metastable and exploring inflationary implications.

Contribution

It provides an analytical inclusion of gravitational corrections to vacuum decay rates and examines the potential for Standard Model inflation.

Findings

Most current top and Higgs masses are in the metastable region.

SM potential can be fine-tuned for inflation but yields incompatible cosmological perturbations.

Gravitational corrections significantly impact vacuum stability analysis.

Abstract

We refine and update the metastability constraint on the Standard Model top and Higgs masses, by analytically including gravitational corrections to the vacuum decay rate. Present best-fit ranges of the top and Higgs masses mostly lie in the narrow metastable region. Furthermore, we show that the SM potential can be fine-tuned in order to be made suitable for inflation. However, SM inflation results in a power spectrum of cosmological perturbations not consistent with observations.