Related papers: Criteria for Natural Hierarchies
I discuss some essential features of the electroweak hierarchy problem and the ensuing motivation for weak-scale supersymmetry. Taking the hierarchy problem seriously, null results in searches for SUSY at the LHC favor specific regions of…
I quickly review the successes of quantum chromodynamics. Then I assess the current state of the electroweak theory, making brief comments about the search for the Higgs boson and some of the open issues for the theory. I sketch the…
The naturalness of a Higgs boson with a mass near 125 GeV is explored in a variety of weak-scale supersymmetric models. A Higgs mass of this size strongly points towards a non-minimal implementation of supersymmetry. The Minimal…
These lectures focus on the structure of various Higgs boson theories. Topics in the first lectures include: mass generation in chiral theories, spontaneous symmetry breaking, neutrino masses, perturbative unitarity, vacuum stability,…
I aim to clarify the physical content and significance of naturalness. Physicists' earliest understanding of naturalness, as an autonomy of scales (AoS) requirement provides the most cogent definition of naturalness and I will assert that…
After discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN the Standard Model acquired a status of the full, correct theory of the elementary particles in the electroweak range. What general conclusions can be inferred from the SM? I am suggesting here…
We point out a novel possible mechanism by which the electroweak hierarchy problem can be avoided in the (effective) quantum field theory. Assuming the existence of a UV complete underlying fundamental theory and treating the cutoff scale…
Constants of Nature that have nongeneric values pose a riddle often referred to as the finetuning problem. The conspicuous values assumed by many physical constants (e.g., the vanishing effective cosmological constant, the smallness of the…
One of the major goals of the Large Hadron Collider is to probe the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism and the generation of the masses of the elementary particles. We review the physics of the Higgs sector in the Standard Model and…
The absence of any signal of supersymmetry (SUSY) at the LHC has raised the SUSY particle mass scale compared to $Z$ boson mass $M_Z$. We investigate the naturalness of the electroweak symmetry breaking after considering radiative symmetry…
In this essay, we discuss the fine-tuning problems of the Higgs mass and the cosmological constant. We argue that these are indeed legitimate problems, as opposed to some other "problems" that are sometimes described using similar…
In this work, we present limits on natural supersymmetry scenarios based on searches in data taken during run 1 of the LHC. We consider a set of 22000 model points in a six dimensional parameter space. These scenarios are minimal in the…
The relaxion mechanism is a novel solution to the hierarchy problem. In this first statistical analysis of the relaxion mechanism, we quantify the relative plausibility of a QCD and a non-QCD relaxion model versus the Standard Model with…
The LHC has confirmed the existence of a mass gap between the known particles and possible new states. Effective field theory is then the appropriate tool to search for low-energy signals of physics beyond the Standard Model. We adopt the…
The discovery of the Higgs particle at around 126 GeV has given us a big hint towards the origin of the Higgs potential. The running quartic self-coupling decreases and crosses zero somewhere in the very high energy scale. It is usually…
We revisit the various measures of naturalness for models of weak scale supersymmetry including 1. electroweak (EW) naturalness, 2. naturalness via sensitivity to high scale parameters (EENZ/BG), 3. sensitivity of Higgs soft term due to…
We argue that the Standard Model (SM) in the Higgs phase does not suffer from a "hierarchy problem" and that similarly the "cosmological constant problem" resolves itself if we understand the SM as a low energy effective theory emerging…
While it is usually stated that dimensional regularization (DR) has no direct physical interpretation, consensus has recently grown on the idea that it might be endowed with special physical properties that would provide the mechanism that…
I present a model addressing coherently the naturalness problem of the electroweak scale and the observed pattern of deviations from the Standard Model in semi-leptonic decays of $B$ mesons. The Higgs and the two scalar leptoquarks…
The Multiple Point Principle, according to which there exist many vacuum states with the same energy density, is put forward as a fine-tuning mechanism. By assuming the existence of three degenerate vacua, we derive the hierarchical ratio…