Induced electroweak symmetry breaking and supersymmetric naturalness

Abstract

In this paper we study a new class of supersymmetric models that can explain a 125 GeV Higgs without fine-tuning. These models contain additional ``auxiliary Higgs'' fields with large tree-level quartic interaction terms (from either $D$ terms or $F$ terms) but no Yukawa couplings. These have electroweak-breaking vacuum expectation values (VEVs), and they contribute to the VEVs of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model Higgs via an induced tadpole in most of the parameter space. The tadpole mechanism has been previously studied in strongly coupled models with large $D$ terms, referred to as ``superconformal technicolor.'' The perturbative models studied here preserve gauge coupling unification in the simplest possible way, namely that all new fields are in complete $SU(5)$ multiplets. The models are consistent with the observed properties of the 125 GeV Higgs-like boson, as well as precision electroweak constraints, and predict a rich phenomenology of new Higgs states at the weak scale. The tuning is less than 10% in most of the phenomenologically allowed parameter space. If electroweak symmetry is broken by an induced tadpole, the cubic and quartic Higgs self-couplings are significantly smaller than in the standard model.