The Selfish Higgs

Abstract

We propose a mechanism to solve the Higgs naturalness problem through a cosmological selection process. The discharging of excited field configurations through membrane nucleation leads to discrete jumps of the cosmological constant and the Higgs mass, which vary in a correlated way. The resulting multitude of universes are all empty, except for those in which the cosmological constant and the Higgs mass are both nearly vanishing. Only under these critical conditions can inflation be activated and create a non-empty universe.

17 pages, 1 figure (one reference added in revised version)

References in corpus (4)

• A Natural Framework for Chaotic Inflation
• An Ignoble Approach to Large Field Inflation
• An Axion-induced SM/MSSM Higgs Landscape and the Weak Gravity Conjecture
• Three-form multiplet and Inflation

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• Relaxing the Higgs mass and its vacuum energy by living at the top of the potential
• Swampland Constraints on Neutrino Masses
• The Higgs field and early universe cosmology: a (brief) review
• Higgs Criticality beyond the Standard Model
• Cosmological Relaxation through the Dark Axion Portal
• Runaway Relaxion from Finite Density
• Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter through Higgs Criticality
• Relaxation of Higgs mass and cosmological constant with four-form fluxes and reheating
• Three-forms and Fayet-Iliopoulos terms in Supergravity: Scanning Planck mass and BPS domain walls
• de Sitter decay through goldstino evaporation
• Lectures on Physics Beyond the Standard Model
• de Sitter Space Decay and Cosmological Constant Relaxation in Unimodular Gravity with Charged Membranes
• Higgs Squared
• The Stochastic Relaxion
• The self-tuning of the cosmological constant and the holographic relaxion
• Hubble selection of the weak scale from QCD quantum critical point
• Chaotic inflation with four-form couplings
• The Selfish Higgs and Reheating
• Flux-mediated Dark Matter
• Higgs Inflation With Four-form Couplings
• Environmental selection of the cosmological constant and electroweak scales
• Gauge hierarchy and metastability from Higgs-driven crunching
• The Forward Physics Facility at the High-Luminosity LHC
• Axion Fragmentation on the Lattice
• Weak Scale Triggers in the SMEFT