A Correlation between the Higgs Mass and Dark Matter
Author(s)
Hertzberg, Mark Peter
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Depending on the value of the Higgs mass, the Standard Model acquires an unstable region at large Higgs field values due to RG running of couplings, which we evaluate at 2-loop order. For currently favored values of the Higgs mass, this renders the electroweak vacuum only metastable with a long lifetime. We argue on statistical grounds that the Higgs field would be highly unlikely to begin in the small field metastable region in the early universe, and thus some new physics should enter in the energy range of order of, or lower than, the instability scale to remove the large field unstable region. We assume that Peccei-Quinn (PQ) dynamics enters to solve the strong CP problem and, for a PQ-scale in this energy range, may also remove the unstable region. We allow the PQ-scale to scan and argue, again on statistical grounds, that its value in our universe should be of order of the instability scale, rather than (significantly) lower. Since the Higgs mass determines the instability scale, which is argued to set the PQ-scale, and since the PQ-scale determines the axion properties, including its dark matter abundance, we are led to a correlation between the Higgs mass and the abundance of dark matter. We find the correlation to be in good agreement with current data.
Date issued
2017-07Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Nuclear ScienceJournal
Advances in High Energy Physics
Publisher
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
Citation
Hertzberg, Mark P. "A Correlation between the Higgs Mass and Dark Matter." Advances in High Energy Physics 2017 (July 2017): 6295927 © 2017 Mark P. Hertzberg
Version: Final published version
ISSN
1687-7357
1687-7365