Higgs near-criticality at future colliders

Abstract

The so-called metastability bound on the Higgs mass suggests that the smallness of the Higgs mass may be a by-product of the metastability of the electroweak vacuum. A significantly strong bound requires new physics capable of lowering the scale where the Higgs quartic coupling turns negative through renormalization group effects, without destabilizing the electroweak vacuum entirely. We analyze in this context the low-scale Majoron model of neutrino masses, which automatically contains two key elements for a viable scenario: heavy fermions to lower the instability scale and a extended scalar sector to stabilize the potential and achieve realistic lifetimes for the electroweak vacuum. We show how the metastability bound can be generalized to theories with multiple scalars and present an efficient way of calculating the tunneling rate in such potentials. We also demonstrate that FCC will probe regions of the parameter space relevant for metastability: large regions of the fermionic sector at FCC-ee and some reach to the scalar sector at FCC-hh. Published by the American Physical Society 2025