Flavor Physics and the Triviality Bound on the Higgs Mass

The triviality of the scalar sector of the standard one-doublet Higgs model implies that this model is only an effective low-energy theory valid below some cut-off scale $\Lambda$. The underlying high-energy theory must include flavor dynamics at a scale of order $\Lambda$ or greater in order to give rise to the different Yukawa couplings of the Higgs to ordinary fermions. This flavor dynamics will generically produce flavor-changing neutral currents and non-universal corrections to Z -> b b-bar. We show that the experimental constraints on the neutral D-meson mass difference imply that $\Lambda$ must be greater than of order 21 TeV. We also discuss bounds on $\Lambda$ from the constraints on extra contributions to the K_L - K_S mass difference and to the coupling of the Z boson to b-quarks. For theories defined about the infrared-stable Gaussian fixed-point, we estimate that this lower bound on $\Lambda$ yields an upper bound of approximately 460 GeV on the Higgs boson's mass, independent of the regulator chosen to define the theory.