Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 151601 (2013)

With the discovery of a Higgs boson cementing our understanding of the Higgs mechanism for electroweak symmetry breaking (ESB), T. G. Steele and Zhi-Wei Wang are now wondering what more it might tell us about the kind of ESB that occurred in the Universe.

In the 1970s, Sidney Coleman and Erick Weinberg suggested that spontaneous ESB could occur through radiative corrections (or 'loop' corrections, after the loops that appear in the progressively more complicated Feynman diagrams that can be drawn for radiative processes). Steele and Wang have applied calculational tricks to work up to the order of nine loops, and find a convergence suggestive of a Higgs mass around 124 GeV — remarkably consistent with the value of 125 GeV measured at CERN.

But this Higgs from radiative ESB would have a much higher self-coupling than the conventional one — something that might, in time, be measurable in the experiments at CERN.