Higgs mass and vacuum stability in the Standard Model at NNLO

TL;DR

This paper provides a precise NNLO analysis of the Standard Model Higgs potential, showing that the Higgs mass near 125 GeV suggests the vacuum is metastable, with implications for early universe cosmology.

Contribution

It presents the first complete NNLO calculation of the Higgs potential, reducing theoretical uncertainties and analyzing vacuum stability at high energy scales.

Findings

Lambda at the Planck scale is close to zero.

Absolute stability is excluded for Mh < 126 GeV.

Vacuum is likely metastable at current Higgs mass.

Abstract

We present the first complete next-to-next-to-leading order analysis of the Standard Model Higgs potential. We computed the two-loop QCD and Yukawa corrections to the relation between the Higgs quartic coupling (lambda) and the Higgs mass (Mh), reducing the theoretical uncertainty in the determination of the critical value of Mh for vacuum stability to 1 GeV. While lambda at the Planck scale is remarkably close to zero, absolute stability of the Higgs potential is excluded at 98% C.L. for Mh < 126 GeV. Possible consequences of the near vanishing of lambda at the Planck scale, including speculations about the role of the Higgs field during inflation, are discussed.