A Cosmological Signature of the Standard Model Higgs Vacuum Instability: Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper proposes that Higgs vacuum instability during inflation could produce primordial black holes, which may account for dark matter, suggesting no need for physics beyond the Standard Model.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cosmological signature of Higgs vacuum instability as a mechanism for primordial black hole formation.

Findings

Higgs potential instability occurs at ~10^{11} GeV.

Primordial black holes formed from Higgs fluctuations could explain dark matter.

Dark matter might originate solely from Standard Model physics.

Abstract

For the current central values of the Higgs and top masses, the Standard Model Higgs potential develops an instability at a scale of the order of $10^{11}$ GeV. We show that a cosmological signature of such instability could be dark matter in the form of primordial black holes seeded by Higgs fluctuations during inflation. The existence of dark matter might not require physics beyond the Standard Model.