State-of-the-Art Calculation of the Decay Rate of Electroweak Vacuum in the Standard Model

So Chigusa; Takeo Moroi; Yutaro Shoji

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.211801

State-of-the-Art Calculation of the Decay Rate of Electroweak Vacuum in the Standard Model

Phys Rev Lett. 2017 Nov 24;119(21):211801. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.211801. Epub 2017 Nov 21.

Authors

So Chigusa¹, Takeo Moroi¹, Yutaro Shoji²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan.
² Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa 277-8582, Japan.

PMID: 29219400
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.211801

Abstract

The decay rate of the electroweak (EW) vacuum is calculated in the framework of the standard model (SM) of particle physics, using the recent progress in the understanding of the decay rate of metastable vacuum in gauge theories. We give a manifestly gauge-invariant expression of the decay rate. We also perform a detailed numerical calculation of the decay rate. With the best-fit values of the SM parameters, we find that the decay rate of the EW vacuum per unit volume is about 10^{-554} Gyr^{-1} Gpc^{-3}; with the uncertainty in the top mass, the decay rate is estimated as 10^{-284}-10^{-1371} Gyr^{-1} Gpc^{-3}.