English

A Goldilocks Higgs

High Energy Physics - Theory 2020-07-15 v3 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

The Higgs could couple to a topological 4-form sector which yields a complex vacuum structure. In general such couplings could lead to direct CP violation in the Higgs sector. In many of the Higgs vacua electroweak symmetry is unbroken. In just as many it breaks when the 4-form flux is large enough. For a fixed value of flux, the symmetry breaking vacua have a smaller vacuum energy than the symmetric ones, where the difference is quantized because it is set by the 44-form flux. This leads to the possibility that there is a value of the 4-form flux for any UV contributions to the Higgs {\it vev} that automatically cancels it down to the right value, \sim TeV, if the 4-form charges are quantized in the units of the electroweak scale. This would still leave the cosmological constant which could be selected anthropically.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1907.05837,
  title  = {A Goldilocks Higgs},
  author = {Nemanja Kaloper and Alexander Westphal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.05837},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

LaTeX, 1+7 pages, 2 figures v3: comments, corrections and a reference added

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:19:47.094Z