Standard Model vacuum decay with gravity

TL;DR

This paper calculates the decay rate of the electroweak vacuum considering gravitational effects and a non-minimal Higgs-curvature coupling, using a three-loop effective potential, and finds gravitational effects are generally small and suppressed near a specific coupling value.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive calculation of vacuum decay including all gravitational effects and the non-minimal coupling, refining previous estimates.

Findings

Gravitational backreaction has a small effect on decay rate.

Effect of gravity is minimized near the conformal coupling $\xi=1/6$.

Moving $\xi$ away from 1/6 suppresses the decay rate.

Abstract

We present a calculation of the decay rate of the electroweak vacuum, fully including all gravitational effects and a possible non-minimal Higgs-curvature coupling $\xi$, and using the three-loop Standard Model effective potential. Without a non-minimal coupling, we find that the effect of the gravitational backreaction is small and less significant than previous calculations suggested. The gravitational effects are smallest, and almost completely suppressed, near the conformal value $\xi=1/6$ of the non-minimal coupling. Moving $\xi$ away from this value in either direction universally suppresses the decay rate.