High Energy Physics Seminars

This will be an informal talk explaining an old story about vacuum instability for light enough Higgs bosons. If the Minimal Standard Model (meaning no new physics other than a single Higgs boson) is a good description of nature up to very large energy scales, then a Higgs mass less than somewhere around 130 GeV would mean that the current "vacuum" of the Universe is a meta-stable state that will someday decay, with disastrous consequences for the physical world as we know it. The original framework of this story featured UVa's own PQ Hung in 1979, and its later development included some work by the speaker himself a score of years ago.