Higgs particle could end the universe … but we’re still here

Although our universe may seem stable, having existed for a whopping 13.7 billion years, several experiments suggest that it is at risk – walking on the edge of a very dangerous cliff. And it’s all down to the instability of a single fundamental particle: the Higgs boson.

In new research by me and my colleagues, just accepted for publication in Physical Letters B, we show that some models of the early universe, those which involve objects called light primordial black holes, are unlikely to be right because they would have triggered the Higgs boson to end the cosmos by now.

The Higgs boson is responsible for the mass and interactions of all the particles we know of. That’s because particle masses are a consequence of elementary particles interacting with a field, dubbed the Higgs field. Because the Higgs boson exists, we know that the field exists.

You can think of this field as a perfectly still water bath that we soak in. It has identical properties across the entire universe. This means we observe the same masses and interactions throughout the cosmos. This uniformity has allowed us to observe and describe the same physics over several millennia (astronomers typically look backward in time).

But the Higgs field isn’t likely to be in the lowest possible energy state it could be in. That means it could theoretically change its state, dropping to a lower energy state in a certain location. If that happened, however, it would alter the laws of physics dramatically.

Such a change would represent what physicists call a phase transition. This is what happens when water turns into vapor, forming bubbles in the process. A phase transition in the Higgs field would similarly create low-energy bubbles of space with completely