Cosmological Relaxation of the Electroweak Scale
Selected for a Viewpoint in Physics week ending PRL 115, 221801 (2015) PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 27 NOVEMBER 2015 Cosmological Relaxation of the Electroweak Scale Peter W. Graham,1 David E. Kaplan,1,2,3,4 and Surjeet Rajendran3 1Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA 2Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA 3Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA 4Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (WPI), Todai Institutes for Advanced Study, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa 277-8583, Japan (Received 22 June 2015; published 23 November 2015) A new class of solutions to the electroweak hierarchy problem is presented that does not require either weak-scale dynamics or anthropics. Dynamical evolution during the early Universe drives the Higgs boson mass to a value much smaller than the cutoff. The simplest model has the particle content of the standard model plus a QCD axion and an inflation sector. The highest cutoff achieved in any technically natural model is 108 GeV. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.221801 PACS numbers: 12.60.Fr Introduction.—In the 1970s, Wilson [1] had discovered Our models only make the weak scale technically natural that a fine-tuning seemed to be required of any field theory [9], and we have not yet attempted to UV complete them which completed the standard model Higgs sector, unless for a fully natural theory, though there are promising its new dynamics appeared at the scale of the Higgs mass.
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