No new physics modifies the Standard Model below the Higgs potential instability scale.
4 events · 2 assessments · 1 decision
Reassessed: still Unknown
verdict confidence 0.75 → 0.80 · credence 0.35
Structured and assessed
First pass. Structure: attached the existing claim "The Higgs quartic coupling runs negative near 10^10 to 10^11 GeV for central Standard Model parameters" as a presupposes edge, since the claim's referent (the instability scale) is defined by that result. Created two named arguments with one new subclaim each, both confirmed novel by the Matcher: for, collider null results up to the TeV scale (scored 0.2, uncontested bedrock, left as a deferred stub); against, nonzero neutrino masses require BSM physics (scored 0.25). Dark matter, baryogenesis, and strong CP are carried in the against argument's written form as prose rather than as nodes, keeping the decomposition proportionate to a 0.35-importance claim. Canonical form kept as is: fourteen words, neutral, and it is the proposition as actually debated. Importance confirmed at the Extractor's 0.35 (notable: the load-bearing caveat of the metastability claim, but a specialized debate), contestation 0.5. Assessment: unknown, confidence 0.75, credence 0.35. Rationale in brief: the claim is a universal negative over an energy range about six orders of magnitude beyond direct experimental reach; partial support (null results) covers a sliver of the range, the known incompleteness of the Standard Model makes intervening new physics plausible but does not fix its scale or Higgs coupling. Considered unsupported and contested as alternatives; rejected both because real partial support exists and the literature's disagreement is over priors, not conflicting evidence. No web search: no recent result could decide a claim about an inaccessible regime, and the physics involved is stable textbook-plus-literature material. Marginal yield 0.2: a deeper pass could cite specific RG studies but would not move the status. Notifying the one dependent (the metastability claim) since this establishes a first assessment on its key presupposition.
Assessed Unknown
verdict confidence 0.75 · credence 0.35
This claim is the working assumption behind the conclusion that the electroweak vacuum is metastable: that conclusion extrapolates the pure Standard Model from collider energies near 10^4 GeV up to the instability scale near 10^10 to 10^11 GeV, and it holds only if nothing new enters in between. Whether that assumption is true is an open question that current experiments cannot answer. Everything directly tested favors it: collider searches have confirmed no particles beyond the Standard Model, and precision measurements agree with its predictions to high accuracy. But direct tests reach only about one part in a million of the energy range the claim covers, and the Standard Model is known to be incomplete: neutrino masses, dark matter, and the baryon asymmetry all require new physics at some scale. Whether any of that new physics sits below the instability scale, and couples to the Higgs strongly enough to alter the potential, is unknown. Several motivated scenarios (a low-scale seesaw, new scalars, supersymmetry at any intermediate scale) would modify the running and could overturn the metastability conclusion in either direction; others (a high-scale seesaw, axions, weakly coupled hidden sectors) would leave it essentially intact. The question would be resolved by discovering Higgs-coupled new physics below the instability scale, which would falsify the claim, but short of probing the full range no observation can verify it.
Claim entered the graph