Standard Model Higgs Boson Mass from Borderline Metastability of the Vacuum

We have studied imposing the condition that the Standard Model effective Higgs potential should have two approximately degenerate vacua, such that the vacuum we live in is just barely metastable: the one in which we live has a vacuum expectation value of 246 GeV and the other one should have a vacuum expectation value of order the Planck scale. Alone borderline metastability gives, using the experimental top quark mass 173.1 \pm 4.6 GeV, the Higgs mass prediction 121.8 \pm 11 GeV. The requirement that the second minimum be at the Planck scale already gave the prediction 173\pm 4 GeV for the top quark mass according to our 1995 paper.