The Higgs vacuum is unstable

TL;DR

Recent high-precision calculations suggest the Higgs vacuum is unstable under the Standard Model, implying new physics must exist below 10^9 GeV to prevent cosmic collapse.

Contribution

The paper provides new calculations demonstrating Higgs vacuum instability and links it to cosmological observations, indicating the need for physics beyond the Standard Model.

Findings

Higgs vacuum stability is excluded at current energies.

Cosmological data imply the vacuum would have decayed during inflation.

New physics likely stabilizes the Higgs vacuum below 10^9 GeV.

Abstract

So far, the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have shown no sign of new physics beyond the Standard Model. Assuming the Standard Model is correct at presently available energies, we can accurately extrapolate the theory to higher energies in order to verify its validity. Here we report the results of new high precision calculations which show that absolute stability of the Higgs vacuum state is now excluded. Combining these new results with the recent observation of primordial gravitational waves by the BICEP Collaboration, we find that the Higgs vacuum state would have quickly decayed during cosmic inflation, leading to a catastrophic collapse of the universe into a black hole. Thus, we are driven to the conclusion that there must be some new physics beyond the Standard Model at energies below the instability scale $\Lambda_I \sim 10^{9}$ GeV, which is responsible for the stabilisation of the Higgs vacuum.