Vevacious: A Tool For Finding The Global Minima Of One-Loop Effective Potentials With Many Scalars

TL;DR

Vevacious is a computational tool designed to identify all minima of one-loop effective potentials in models with multiple scalars, and to evaluate the stability and tunneling times of these minima, ensuring the physical vacuum's longevity.

Contribution

It introduces Vevacious, a new program that finds all extrema of complex scalar potentials and calculates tunneling times, enhancing stability analysis in particle physics models.

Findings

Successfully finds all minima of complex scalar potentials.

Calculates tunneling times to assess vacuum stability.

Compatible with models specified in SLHA format.

Abstract

Several extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics contain additional scalars implying a more complex scalar potential compared to that of the Standard Model. In general these potentials allow for charge and/or color breaking minima besides the desired one with correctly broken SU(2)_L times U(1)_Y . Even if one assumes that a metastable local minimum is realized, one has to ensure that its lifetime exceeds that of our universe. We introduce a new program called Vevacious which takes a generic expression for a one-loop effective potential energy function and finds all the tree-level extrema, which are then used as the starting points for gradient-based minimization of the one-loop effective potential. The tunneling time from a given input vacuum to the deepest minimum, if different from the input vacuum, can be calculated. The parameter points are given as files in the SLHA format (though is not restricted to supersymmetric models), and new model files can be easily generated automatically by the Mathematica package SARAH. This code uses HOM4PS2 to find all the minima of the tree-level potential, PyMinuit to follow gradients to the minima of the one-loop potential, and CosmoTransitions to calculate tunneling times.