Effective operators and vacuum instability as heralds of new physics
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abstract
For a light enough Higgs boson, the effective potential of the Standard Model
develops a dangerous instability at some high energy scale, Lambda, signalling
the need for new physics below that scale. On the other hand, a typical
low-energy remnant of new physics at some heavy scale, M, is the presence of
effective non-renormalizable operators (NROs), suppressed by powers of 1/M. It
has been claimed that such operators may modify the behaviour of the effective
potential, in such a way as to significantly lower the instability scale. We
critically reanalyze the interplay between non-renormalizable operators and
vacuum instabilities and find that, contrary to these claims, the effect of
NROs on instability bounds is generically small whenever it can be reliably
computed.
