Axionic Landscape for Higgs Near-Criticality

Understand

The measured value of the Higgs quartic coupling $\lambda$ is peculiarly close to the critical value above which the Higgs potential becomes unstable, when extrapolated to high scales by renormalization group running.

• It is tempting to speculate that there is an anthropic reason behind this near-criticality.
• We show how an axionic field can provide a landscape of vacuum states in which $\lambda$ scans.
• These states are populated during inflation to create a multiverse with different quartic couplings, with a probability distribution $P$ that can be computed.