Musings on cosmological relaxation and the hierarchy problem

Abstract

Recently Graham, Kaplan and Rajendran [1] proposed cosmological relaxation as a mechanism for generating a hierarchically small Higgs vacuum expectation value. Inspired by this we collect some thoughts on steps towards a solution to the electroweak hierarchy problem and apply them to the original model of cosmological relaxation [1]. To do so, we study the dynamics of the model and determine the relation between the fundamental input parameters and the electroweak vacuum expectation value. Depending on the input parameters the model exhibits three qualitatively different regimes, two of which allow for hierarchically small Higgs vacuum expectation values. One leads to standard electroweak symmetry breaking whereas in the other regime electroweak symmetry is mainly broken by a Higgs source term. While the latter is not acceptable in a model based on the QCD axion, in non-QCD models this may lead to new and interesting signatures in Higgs observables.

32 pages, 8 figures; v2 added references

References in corpus (18)

• Monodromy in the CMB: Gravity Waves and String Inflation
• Cosmological Relaxation of the Electroweak Scale
• A Natural Framework for Chaotic Inflation
• Conformal Symmetry and the Standard Model
• A solution to the hierarchy problem from an almost decoupled hidden sector within a classically scale invariant theory
• Electroweak Higgs as a pseudo-Goldstone boson of broken scale invariance
• Shadow Higgs from a scale-invariant hidden $U(1{)}_s$ model
• Effective Action, Conformal Anomaly and the Issue of Quadratic Divergences
• The Minimal Scale Invariant Extension of the Standard Model
• Cosmological Higgs-Axion Interplay for a Naturally Small Electroweak Scale
• Tuning and Backreaction in F-term Axion Monodromy Inflation
• Is the Relaxion an Axion?
• Higgs Self-Coupling Measurements at a 100 TeV Hadron Collider
• Realistic Yukawa Couplings through Instantons in Intersecting Brane Worlds
• Natural Heavy Supersymmetry
• Electroweak relaxation from finite temperature
• Relaxing the Electroweak Scale: the Role of Broken dS Symmetry
• The Half-composite Two Higgs Doublet Model and the Relaxion

Cited by in corpus (25)

• Relaxion Monodromy and the Weak Gravity Conjecture
• FindBounce: package for multi-field bounce actions
• Is the Relaxion an Axion?
• Axion Monodromy and the Weak Gravity Conjecture
• Natural Heavy Supersymmetry
• Dynamics of Relaxed Inflation
• Dynamics of the cosmological relaxation after reheating
• Higgs relaxation after inflation
• Monodromy Dark Matter
• Towards Axion Monodromy Inflation with Warped KK-Modes
• Relaxation of the Composite Higgs Little Hierarchy
• Relaxion Cosmology and the Price of Fine-Tuning
• Naturalness of the relaxion mechanism
• Mirror Cosmological Relaxation of the Electroweak Scale
• Relaxion Dark Matter
• Relaxion window
• Towards the fate of the oscillating false vacuum
• Fast-Rolling Relaxion
• A possible interpretation of the Higgs mass by the cosmological attractive relaxion
• A warped relaxion
• Cosmological Relaxation from Dark Fermion Production
• Gravitational tests of electroweak relaxation
• The quantum criticality of the Standard Model and the hierarchy problem
• Lectures on Naturalness, String Landscape and Multiverse
• Mixing Particle Production for Relaxion Mechanism