Higgs stability-bound and fermionic dark matter

Understand

Higgs-portal interactions of fermionic dark matter -- in contrast to fermions coupled via Yukawa interactions -- can have a stabilizing effect on the standard-model Higgs potential.

• A non-perturbative renormalization-group analysis reveals that, similar to higher-order operators in the Higgs potential itself, the fermionic portal coupling can increase the metastability scale by only about one order of magnitude.
• Furthermore, this regime of very weakly coupled dark matter is in conflict with relic-density constraints.
• Conversely, fermionic dark matter with the right relic abundance requires either a low cutoff scale of the effective field theory or a strongly interacting scalar sector.