Upon expressing the Higgs potential in terms of the field H0, we find



The first term in V is a constant energy density which can be interpreted as a contribution to the vacuum energy,



Although the parameter  is unknown, we can get a feeling for the scale of the Higgs vacuum energy by supposing . The Higgs vacuum energy contributes to the cosmological constant of general relativity an amount . Such a term would have a remarkable effect on the geometry of spacetime, manifesting itself over a distance scale of ! The present limit on the cosmological constant is (RPP 1990). There must then be some important and non-trivial physics which forces the suppression or cancellation of the vacuum energy by roughly fifty orders of magnitude.