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Published October 7, 2013 | Submitted
Journal Article Open

Cyclic cosmology, conformal symmetry and the metastability of the Higgs

Abstract

Recent measurements at the LHC suggest that the current Higgs vacuum could be metastable with a modest barrier (height (10^(10–12) GeV)^4) separating it from a ground state with negative vacuum density of order the Planck scale. We note that metastability is problematic for standard bang cosmology but is essential for cyclic cosmology in order to end one cycle, bounce, and begin the next. In this Letter, motivated by the approximate scaling symmetry of the standard model of particle physics and the primordial large-scale structure of the universe, we use our recent formulation of the Weyl-invariant version of the standard model coupled to gravity to track the evolution of the Higgs in a regularly bouncing cosmology. We find a band of solutions in which the Higgs field escapes from the metastable phase during each big crunch, passes through the bang into an expanding phase, and returns to the metastable vacuum, cycle after cycle after cycle. We show that, due to the effect of the Higgs, the infinitely cycling universe is geodesically complete, in contrast to inflation.

Additional Information

© 2013 Elsevier B.V. Received 31 July 2013; Received in revised form 23 August 2013; Accepted 26 August 2013; Available online 2 September 2013. We thank A. Ijjas for comments on the manuscript. Research at Perimeter Institute is supported by the Government of Canada through Industry Canada and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Research and Innovation. This research was partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under grant number DE-FG03-84ER40168 (I.B.) and under grant number DE-FG02-91ER40671 (P.J.S.).

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