Connecting the Higgs Potential and Primordial Black Holes

TL;DR

This paper explores how primordial black holes could trigger Higgs vacuum decay, and uses this connection to constrain black hole mass spectra and Higgs potential parameters based on cosmological and particle physics considerations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed calculation linking primordial black hole properties with Higgs vacuum stability, offering a novel way to constrain both black hole spectra and Higgs potential parameters.

Findings

Derived the fraction of universe decayed to true vacuum as a function of black hole mass and formation temperature.

Established constraints on primordial black hole mass spectrum based on Higgs vacuum stability.

Proposed a method to use observed black holes to infer Higgs potential parameters.

Abstract

It was recently demonstrated that small small black holes can act as seeds for nucleating decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum, dramatically increasing the tunneling probability. Any primordial black hole lighter than $4.5 \times 10^{14}$g at formation would have evaporated by now, and in the absence of new physics beyond the standard model, would therefore have entered the mass range in which seeded decay occurs, however, such true vacuum bubbles must percolate in order to completely destroy the false vacuum; this depends on the bubble number density and the rate of expansion of the universe. Here, we compute the fraction of the universe that has decayed to the true vacuum as a function of the formation temperature (or equivalently, mass) of the primordial black holes, and the spectral index of the fluctuations responsible for their formation. This allows us to constrain the mass spectrum of primordial black holes given a particular Higgs potential and conversely, should we discover primordial black holes of definite mass, we can constrain the Higgs potential parameters.