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

© 2018 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP 3 . For the current central values of the Higgs boson and top quark masses, the standard model Higgs potential develops an instability at a scale of the order of 1011 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.