Vacuum stability of standard model++

Abstract

The latest results of the ATLAS and CMS experiments point to a preferred narrow Higgs mass range (mH ≃ 124 - 126 GeV) in which the effective potential of the Standard Model (SM) develops a vacuum instability at a scale 109 - 1011 GeV, with the precise scale depending on the precise value of the top quark mass and the strong coupling constant. Motivated by this experimental situation, we present here a detailed investigation about the stability of the SM++ vacuum, which is characterized by a simple extension of the SM obtained by adding to the scalar sector a complex SU(2) singlet that has the quantum numbers of the right-handed neutrino, H″, and to the gauge sector an U(1) that is broken by the vacuum expectation value of H″. We derive the complete set of renormalization group equations at one loop. We then pursue a numerical study of the system to determine the triviality and vacuum stability bounds, using a scan of 10 4 random set of points to fix the initial conditions. We show that, if there is no mixing in the scalar sector, the top Yukawa coupling drives the quartic Higgs coupling to negative values in the ultraviolet and, as for the SM, the effective potential develops an instability below the Planck scale. However, for a mixing angle -0.35 ≲ α ≲ -0.02 or 0.01 ≲ α ≲ 0.35, with the new scalar mass in the range 500 GeV ≲ m h″ ≲ 8 TeV, the SM++ ground state can be absolutely stable up to the Planck scale. These results are largely independent of TeV-scale free parameters in the model: the mass of the non-anomalous U(1) gauge boson and its branching fractions. © 2013 SISSA.