Abstract
In light of no new physics being discovered at the LHC, ideas which tackle the hierarchy problem without novelties around the TeV scale must be taken seriously. Such is a cosmological relaxation model of the Higgs boson mass, proposed in the pre-LHC era, which does not rely on new physics below the Planck scale. This scenario introduces a different notion of naturalness according to which the vacuum with a small expectation value of the Higgs field corresponds to an infinitely enhanced entropy point of the vacuum landscape that becomes an attractor of cosmological inflationary evolution. In this framework we study numerically the evolution of the Higgs vacuum expectation value (VEV). We model the inflationary vacuum-to-vacuum transitions that are triggered by nucleation of branes charged under three-form fields as a random walk. In particular, we investigate the impact of the number of coupled three-forms on the convergence rate of the Higgs VEV. We discover an enhanced rate when increasing the number of brane charges. Moreover, we show that for late times the inclusion of more charges is equivalent to additional brane nucleations.
Highlights
Rooted in the quadratic sensitivity of the Higgs boson mass term to the UV cutoff, the hierarchy problem is still an unresolved puzzle in theoretical physics. (For a discussion of the hierarchy problem and its connection to naturalness, see [1].) Naturally, since the standard picture raised the problem in the first place a solution to it most likely has to contain new ingredients
In the pre-LHC era an alternative idea of solving the hierarchy problem via cosmological relaxation of the Higgs boson mass has been suggested [7,8]. This scenario does not rely on any low energy physics as it can push the scale of the onset of new physics up to the Planck scale
At the same time the Higgs vacuum expectation value (VEV) acts as a backcontrol parameter that directs the convergence of the relaxation progress
Summary
Rooted in the quadratic sensitivity of the Higgs boson mass term to the UV cutoff, the hierarchy problem is still an unresolved puzzle in theoretical physics. (For a discussion of the hierarchy problem and its connection to naturalness, see [1].) Naturally, since the standard picture raised the problem in the first place a solution to it most likely has to contain new ingredients. Most of the proposed solutions such as supersymmetry, which has no quadratic divergences [2], technicolor [3], extra dimensions [4,5] or large number of species [6], predict stabilizing new physics around a scale not much larger than the weak scale These predicted deviations from the standard model have not been observed at currently available energy scales. In the pre-LHC era an alternative idea of solving the hierarchy problem via cosmological relaxation of the Higgs boson mass has been suggested [7,8]. This scenario does not rely on any low energy physics as it can push the scale of the onset of new physics up to the Planck scale.
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