Global Electroweak Symmetric Vacuum

Understand

Although the Higgs potential in the Standard Model (SM) contains only a simple electroweak symmetry breaking vacuum in the small field region, additional metastable or global vacua could exist in models beyond the SM.

• In this paper, we study one intriguing scenario with an additional electroweak symmetric vacuum that could be the global one.
• For the thermal universe ending at the current metastable vacuum, the electroweak symmetry should stay non-restored at high temperatures.
• We realize the scenario in a model with Higgs-portal couplings to SM singlet scalars with approximately global O(N) symmetries with a large N.