Speaker
Prof.
Jose Ramon Espinosa
(IFAE, Barcelona)
Description
Extrapolating the Standard Model to high scales using the renormalisation
group, three possibilities arise, depending on the mass of the Higgs
boson: if the Higgs mass is large enough the Higgs self-coupling may blow
up, entailing some new non-perturbative dynamics; if the Higgs mass is
small the effective potential of the Standard Model may reveal an
instability; or the Standard Model may survive all the way to the Planck
scale for an intermediate range of Higgs masses. We evaluate the relative
likelihoods of these three possibilities, on the basis of a global fit to
the Standard Model made using the Gfitter package. This uses the
information about the Higgs mass available directly from Higgs searches at
LEP and now the Tevatron, and indirectly from precision electroweak data.
We find that the `blow-up' scenario is disfavoured at the 99\% confidence
level (96\% without the Tevatron exclusion), whereas the `metastable' and
`survival' scenarios both remain quite plausible. A future measurement of
the mass of the Higgs boson could determine the fate of the Standard
Model.
Primary author
Prof.
Jose Ramon Espinosa
(IFAE, Barcelona)
