  The vacuum stability problem is usually studied assuming that the universe is
located in the desired electroweak-breaking vacuum. This may not be the case,
however, as seen by checking the evolution history of the early universe. The
transition to the stable desired vacuum may not be possible, or the desired
vacuum could be meta-stable and long-lived but the universe may already be in
an undesired global vacuum from an early stage. We reveal that these situations
exist even in the simplest singlet extension of the Standard Model, propose a
general procedure to identify them, and divide the parameter space according to
different cases. We find that checking cosmological history can provide a more
stringent, reasonable and sometimes computationally cheaper limit of vacuum
stability on new physics models than the traditional

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology;Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics