Cyclic Cosmology, Conformal Symmetry and the Metastability of the Higgs

TL;DR

This paper explores a cyclic universe model where the Higgs field's metastability is managed through Weyl-invariant standard model physics, enabling endless cycles and geodesic completeness, contrasting with inflationary models.

Contribution

It introduces a Weyl-invariant standard model framework to demonstrate a cyclic cosmology with Higgs metastability, ensuring universe completeness across cycles.

Findings

Higgs field escapes metastability during each cycle's crunch.

The universe undergoes infinite cycles passing through big bang and crunch.

The model achieves geodesic completeness, unlike inflationary scenarios.

Abstract

Recent measurements at the LHC suggest that the current Higgs vacuum could be metastable with a modest barrier (height 10^{10-12}{GeV})^{4}) separating it from a ground state with negative vacuum density of order the Planck scale. We note that metastability is problematic for big bang to end one cycle, bounce, and begin the next. In this paper, motivated by the approximate scaling symmetry of the standard model of particle physics and the primordial large-scale structure of the universe, we use our recent formulation of the Weyl-invariant version of the standard model coupled to gravity to track the evolution of the Higgs in a regularly bouncing cosmology. We find a band of solutions in which the Higgs field escapes from the metastable phase during each big crunch, passes through the bang into an expanding phase, and returns to the metastable vacuum, cycle after cycle after cycle. We show that, due to the effect of the Higgs, the infinitely cycling universe is geodesically complete, in contrast to inflation.