File:Higgs-Mass-MetaStability.svg

Summary

Based upon The top quark and Higgs boson masses and the stability of the electroweak vacuum paper by S. Alekhin, A. Djouadi, S. Moch. original image: File:Higgs mass metastability.png

original caption:

The 2σ ellipses in the [M_H,m^pole_t] plane that one obtains from the current top quark and Higgs mass measurements at the Tevatron and LHC and which can be expected in future measurements at the LHC and at the ILC, when confronted with the areas in which the SM vacuum is absolutely stable, metastable and unstable up to the Planck scale.

nb. the large ellipse is based on measurements, the smaller two are only to be taken as illustration of the expected accuracy of possible future experiments.

"Metastable" means (fn. 8):

This situation occurs when the true minimum of the scalar potential is deeper than the standard electroweak minimum but the latter has a lifetime that is larger than the age of the universe.

The boundaries of the regions are from Giuseppe Degrassi, Stefano Di Vita, Joan Elias-Miró, José R. Espinosa, Gian F. Giudice, Gino Isidori, Alessandro Strumia, Higgs mass and vacuum stability in the Standard Model at NNLO (2012), arXiv:1205.6497.

The label of the outer ellipse was changed to "Tevatron" from "Tevatron+lHC" for some reason, but it is in fact based on the combined results of Tevatron and LHC as of 2012 (while "LHC" shows the expected order of 95%-confidence after the collection of data over LHC lifetime).

Copyright status:

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Folletto