Quintessence Saves Higgs Instability

Abstract

We study a model where quintessence potential $e^{-ξφ}$ coupled to Higgs potential. We calculate the evolution of the quintessence, and track the running of the effective Higgs self-coupling. We find it slightly larger than that of the standard model in the past. Requiring the electroweak vacuum to be absolutely stable in inflationary era, we find a lower bound $ξ> 0.35\pm 0.05$, where the uncertainty is mainly from the measurement of the top quark mass. This lower bound, together with the upper bound from the observation for dark energy $ξ\lesssim0.6$, narrows down the parameter space and makes it possible to test this model in the near future. Interestingly, the bound on $ξ$, if actually shown to be the case by observation, supports the recently proposed Swampland Conjecture.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: The 2 loop RGE running of $\lambda_\text{eff}$ with different $\xi$ values, where we fixed top mass as the central value 173.34 GeV. The gray solid, blue dashed, and red dotted curves represents $e^{-\xi\phi}=1.0$, $1.08$, and $1.17$, respectively. When $\phi$ during inflation is fixed as is shown in \ref{['main']}, the curves correspond to $\xi=0$, $0.35$, and $0.5$, respectively.