Singlet Assisted Vacuum Stability and the Higgs to Diphoton Rate

TL;DR

This paper explores how adding a singlet scalar to the Standard Model can stabilize the electroweak vacuum and enhance the Higgs to diphoton decay rate, with implications for collider searches and high-scale stability.

Contribution

It introduces a minimal singlet scalar extension that stabilizes the vacuum and boosts the diphoton rate, providing a viable alternative to supersymmetry.

Findings

Vacuum stability up to 10^9 GeV with heavy singlet

Enhanced diphoton rate of about 1.7 times the SM

Potential for LHC detection via Higgs-like signals

Abstract

Light, electrically charged vector-like `leptons' with order one Yukawa couplings can enhance the Higgs to diphoton decay rate, as is suggested by measurements of the signal strength \mu_{\gamma\gamma} by ATLAS and CMS. However, the large Yukawa interactions tend to drive the Higgs quartic coupling negative at a low scale \Lambda < 10 TeV, and as such new physics is required to stabilize the electroweak vacuum. A plausible option, which does not rely on supersymmetry, is that the Higgs in fact has a much larger tree level quartic coupling than in the Standard Model, which is possible with an extended scalar sector. We investigate in detail the minimal model with a new real singlet scalar which condenses and mixes with the Higgs. The mechanism is very efficient when the singlet is heavier than the weak scale m_s ~ O(TeV), in which case the vacuum can be stable and the couplings can be perturbative up to scales \Lambda ~ 10^9 GeV while \mu_{\gamma\gamma} = 1.7. On the other hand, for a singlet at the weak scale, a substantial shift in the Higgs quartic coupling requires sizable Higgs-singlet mixing. Such mixing can be utilized to further enhance \mu_{\gamma\gamma} through Yukawa couplings of the singlet to the vector-like leptons. In this case, for an enhancement \mu_{\gamma\gamma} \sim 1.7 it is possible to obtain a stable vacuum up to scales \Lambda ~ 1000 TeV. The singlet can have significant mixing with the Higgs particle, allowing for its resonant production via gluon fusion at the LHC, and can be searched for through Higgs like decays and decays to vector-like leptons, which can lead to multi-lepton final states. We also comment on UV extensions of the minimal model.