Absolute electroweak vacuum stability requires a top-quark pole mass below about 171 GeV
5 events · 2 assessments · 2 decisions
Reassessed confirmed verified
Triggered as structure_and_assess, but the claim arrived already structured (two subclaims: the measured Higgs mass as a requires premise, SM validity to the Planck scale as an assumes scope premise) and carrying a verified assessment. Reviewed the decomposition and judged it complete: the remaining inputs (αs(mZ), calculational correctness of the shared two-loop matching) are uncontested measured values or derivation detail that fail the §2 claim bar, so they stay in prose; no named arguments needed for a single natural line of support. Ran a light refresh instead of duplicating structure: two web searches confirmed the critical value is unchanged and newly reconfirmed by Hiller et al. 2024 (PRD 110, 115017), which I folded into the assessment; confidence raised to 0.9 after the adversarial check found no dissenting calculation. Recorded two affirming in-the-wild instances read during the pass (PDG 2023 top-quark review; a neutrino-mass/vacuum-stability paper using the 171 GeV boundary as its SM baseline). Canonical form judged fresh: fourteen words, neutral, states the proposition as debated; kept. Importance confirmed at 0.3 (notable) with contestation 0.15 recorded separately: the conditional bound is consensus; the live dispute in the neighborhood concerns the measured top mass, not this critical value. Marginal yield 0.1: the question is saturated at NNLO with multiple independent confirmations. Status unchanged (verified before and after), so no dependent notification is warranted.
Reassessed: still Verified
verdict confidence 0.85 → 0.90 · credence 0.95
Structured and assessed
First pass (structure_and_assess). Decomposition kept deliberately light: the claim is a well-converged technical result, so per §19 it earns settled-scaffolding treatment. Two edges: (1) ASSUMES a newly created claim "The Standard Model remains valid with no new physics up to the Planck scale" (Matcher confirmed novel; nearest neighbor 732893db-5326-4ee0-9236-c10e9a5dcd95 is the narrower instability-scale version, flagged to Curator for a specifies link); (2) REQUIRES the existing Higgs-mass-125-GeV claim (0306e60c). Deliberately NOT attached: the quartic-coupling-running claim (c964e84b) is already a parent of this claim, so attaching it as a subclaim would create a cycle; its evidential relevance is carried in the reasoning trace instead. Also declined to mint an "NNLO calculations are reliable" subclaim (Matcher said novel): nobody credibly disputes it, so it fails the effort bar and lives in prose. αs sensitivity kept in prose as a derivation detail. No named argument: one natural line of support. Importance confirmed at 0.3 (notable premise under the metastability discourse, contestation 0.15). Assessed VERIFIED (confidence 0.85, credence 0.93, yield 0.15) on convergent primary literature: Buttazzo et al. Mt < 171.36 ± 0.46 GeV (arXiv:1307.3536 via 1512.01222), Degrassi et al. arXiv:1205.6497, gauge-independent confirmation Bednyakov et al. arXiv:1507.08833. Canonical form judged fine as-is. Web search used: 4 of 5.
Assessed Verified
verdict confidence 0.85 · credence 0.93
Within the Standard Model, whether the electroweak vacuum is absolutely stable up to the Planck scale depends almost entirely on the top-quark mass: a heavier top drives the Higgs quartic coupling negative at high energies, opening a deeper minimum in the potential. State-of-the-art calculations, carried out independently by several groups at next-to-next-to-leading-order precision, converge on a critical top pole mass of roughly 171.0 to 171.5 GeV for the measured Higgs mass: below it the vacuum is absolutely stable, above it metastable. The most widely cited analysis states the condition as a top pole mass below 171.4 GeV with a combined uncertainty near half a GeV, dominated by the strong coupling constant, and a later gauge-invariant recalculation confirms the same range. "About 171 GeV" is therefore an accurate one-number summary of an uncontested technical result. The bound is a conditional statement. It presupposes that the Standard Model holds without new physics up to the Planck scale; any new particles or interactions below that scale would change the running of the couplings and could remove or relocate the boundary entirely. It is also computed for a Higgs boson mass near 125 GeV, now measured to high precision. Whether the actually measured top mass sits above or below this threshold is a separate and more delicate question, since it turns on relating collider measurements to the pole mass.
Claim entered the graph