English

Establishing the Isolated Standard Model

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2017-07-19 v1

Abstract

The goal of this article is to initiate a discussion on what it takes to claim "there is no new physics at the weak scale," namely that the Standard Model (SM) is "isolated." The lack of discovery of beyond the SM (BSM) physics suggests that this may be the case. But to truly establish this statement requires proving all "connected" BSM theories are false, which presents a significant challenge. We propose a general approach to quantitatively assess the current status and future prospects of establishing the isolated SM (ISM), which we give a reasonable definition of. We consider broad elements of BSM theories, and show many examples where current experimental results are not sufficient to verify the ISM. In some cases, there is a clear roadmap for the future experimental program, which we outline, while in other cases, further efforts -- both theoretical and experimental -- are needed in order to robustly claim the establishment of the ISM in the absence of new physics discoveries.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1702.06954,
  title  = {Establishing the Isolated Standard Model},
  author = {James D. Wells and Zhengkang Zhang and Yue Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.06954},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

10 pages, 2 figures, 1 table

R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:25:42.928Z