A Cosmological Signature of the Standard Model Higgs Vacuum Instability: Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter

Abstract

For the current central values of the Higgs and top masses, the Standard Model Higgs potential develops an instability at a scale of the order of $10^{11}$ GeV. We show that a cosmological signature of such instability could be dark matter in the form of primordial black holes seeded by Higgs fluctuations during inflation. The existence of dark matter might not require physics beyond the Standard Model.

6+1 pages, 3 figures; v2: updated to the published PRL version, and added an Appendix about Non-Gaussian effects