Relaxing the Higgs mass and its vacuum energy by living at the top of the potential

Abstract

We consider an ultra-light scalar coupled to the Higgs in the presence of heavier new physics. In the electroweak broken phase the Higgs gives a tree-level contribution to the light-scalar potential, while new physics contributes at loop level. Thereby, the theory has a cosmologically meta-stable phase where the light scalar is around the top of its potential, and the Higgs is a loop factor lighter than new physics. Such regions with precarious naturalness are anthropically and environmentally selected, as regions with heavier Higgs crunch quickly. We expect observable effects of rolling in the dark-energy equation of state. Furthermore, vacuum energies up to the weak scale can be canceled down to anthropically small values.

14 pages, 3 figures; sec. 4.2 extended compared to published version

References in corpus (5)

• The Swampland: Introduction and Review
• The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory
• Relaxing the Cosmological Constant: a Proof of Concept
• Predictive Landscapes and New Physics at a TeV
• A landscape for the cosmological constant and the Higgs mass

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• Self-Organised Localisation
• Crunching Dilaton, Hidden Naturalness
• Axion quality from the (anti)symmetric of SU(N)
• Sliding Naturalness
• Sliding Naturalness: Cosmological Selection of the Weak Scale
• Higgs Criticality beyond the Standard Model
• Cosmological Relaxation through the Dark Axion Portal
• Runaway Relaxion from Finite Density
• Higgs Squared
• Hubble selection of the weak scale from QCD quantum critical point
• Hierarchies from Landscape Probability Gradients and Critical Boundaries
• Gauge hierarchy and metastability from Higgs-driven crunching
• The Forward Physics Facility at the High-Luminosity LHC
• Weak Scale Triggers in the SMEFT