Primordial Black Holes from Higgs Vacuum Instability: Avoiding Fine-tuning through an Ultraviolet Safe Mechanism

TL;DR

This paper proposes a mechanism for primordial black hole formation from Higgs vacuum fluctuations during inflation, avoiding fine-tuning by coupling the Higgs to a heavy scalar that stabilizes the potential at high energies.

Contribution

It introduces an ultraviolet-safe coupling to stabilize the Higgs potential, enabling primordial black hole dark matter formation without beyond-Standard Model physics.

Findings

Higgs fluctuations can generate primordial black holes during inflation.

Coupling to a heavy scalar stabilizes the Higgs potential in the UV.

The mechanism avoids fine-tuning issues present in previous models.

Abstract

We have recently proposed the idea that dark matter in our universe is formed by primordial black holes generated by Standard Model Higgs fluctuations during inflation and thanks to the fact that the Standard Model Higgs potential develops an instability at a scale of the order of $10^{11}$ GeV. In this sense, dark matter does not need any physics beyond the Standard Model, although the mechanism needs fine-tuning to avoid the overshooting of the Higgs into the dangerous AdS vacuum. We show how such fine-tuning can be naturally avoided by coupling the Higgs to a very heavy scalar with mass $\gg 10^{11}$ GeV that stabilises the potential in the deep ultraviolet, but preserving the basic feature of the mechanism which is built within the Standard Model.