Standard Model vacuum decay with gravity

Understand

We present a calculation of the decay rate of the electroweak vacuum, fully including all gravitational effects and a possible non-minimal Higgs-curvature coupling $\xi$, and using the three-loop Standard Model effective potential.

• Without a non-minimal coupling, we find that the effect of the gravitational backreaction is small and less significant than previous calculations suggested.
• The gravitational effects are smallest, and almost completely suppressed, near the conformal value $\xi=1/6$ of the non-minimal coupling.
• Moving $\xi$ away from this value in either direction universally suppresses the decay rate.