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Description
According to the Standard Model, central values of the top quark and Higgs boson masses, and the strong coupling constant, imply that our Universe resides in a metastable state. Its lifetime can be calculated using instanton methods. Such theoretical predictions have been continuously refined, together with the experimental progress at colliders on the measurements of input parameters. We revised the theory calculation and corrected an error in previous literature using the most recent inputs and produced the latest state-of-the-art prediction for the lifetime. The conceptual mistake that we fixed is related to the counting of gauge fields. I will explain how to count such modes and present an even more general way to treat generic fluctuations for arbitrary potentials.