The Fate of the Higgs Vacuum

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• Ruth Gregory (Durham)
• Thursday 13 October 2016, 13:45-15:00
• Theory Library.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Mike Gunn.

Now that the Higgs boson has finally been detected, its mass suggests that we are in a region of “metastability”, with various claims being made about the lifetime of the vacuum. However, the new minimum lies in a Planckian regime, and we would expect gravity to be relevant in any decay process. The decay of a false vacuum is always described by a tunneling process, the Coleman-de Luccia instanton, however, this assumes our universe is featureless. Just as impurities can act as nucleation sites of a phase transition, gravitational impurities, in the guise of black holes, can act as bubble nucleation sites for false vacuum decay. I will describe how a black hole can significantly enhance the probability of vacuum decay, and discuss implications for the Higgs vacuum.

This talk is part of the Theoretical Physics Seminars series.

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