Attracting the Electroweak Scale to a Tachyonic Trap
Abstract
We propose a new mechanism to dynamically select the electroweak scale during inflation. An axion-like field that couples quadratically to the Higgs with a large initial velocity towards a critical point where the Higgs becomes massless. When crosses this point, it enters a region where the Higgs mass is tachyonic and this results into an explosive production of Higgs particles. Consequently, a back-reaction potential is generated and the field is attracted back to . After a series of oscillations around this point it is eventually trapped in its vicinity due to the periodic term of the potential. The model avoids transplanckian field excursions, requires very few e-folds of inflation and it is compatible with inflation scales up to . The mass of lies in the range of hundreds of GeV to a few TeV and it can be potentially probed in future colliders.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2210.13484,
title = {Attracting the Electroweak Scale to a Tachyonic Trap},
author = {Sokratis Trifinopoulos and Miguel Vanvlasselaer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.13484},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
Published version, minor changes