Renormalization Group Flow of the Higgs Potential

TL;DR

This paper uses the functional renormalization group to analyze the Higgs potential, revealing insights into its stability and the impact of higher-dimensional operators on the Higgs mass bounds.

Contribution

It provides a detailed RG flow analysis of the Higgs potential, highlighting the effects of higher-dimensional operators on stability bounds.

Findings

Higher-dimensional operators can relax the lower Higgs mass bound.

The effective potential's global properties are clarified using the functional RG.

Limitations of standard stability estimates are addressed.

Abstract

We summarize results for local and global properties of the effective potential for the Higgs boson obtained from the functional renormalization group, which allows to describe the effective potential as a function of both scalar field amplitude and RG scale. This sheds light onto the limitations of standard estimates which rely on the identification of the two scales and helps clarifying the origin of a possible property of meta-stability of the Higgs potential. We demonstrate that the inclusion of higher-dimensional operators induced by an underlying theory at a high scale (GUT or Planck scale) can relax the conventional lower bound on the Higgs mass derived from the criterion of absolute stability.