Related papers: Gravity, Scale Invariance and the Hierarchy Proble…
Both parameters in the Higgs field's potential, its mass and quartic coupling, appear fine-tuned to near-critical values, which gives rise to the hierarchy problem and the metastability of the electroweak vacuum. Whereas such behavior…
The existence of a fundamental scale, a lower bound to any output of a position measurement, seems to be a model-independent feature of quantum gravity. In fact, different approaches to this theory lead to this result. The key ingredients…
We propose a unification of some fine-tuning problems -- really in this article only the problem of why the weak scale is so small in energy compared to a presumed fundamental scale, being say the Planck scale -- by postulating the zero or…
Scale invariance in the theory of classical mechanics can be induced from the scale invariance of background fields. In this paper we consider the relation between the scale invariance and the constants of particle motion in a self-similar…
A longstanding question that has puzzled Physicists is the so called gauge hierarchy problem, that is why is there such a wide gap between the mass of a Planck particle, $10^{-5}gms$ and the mass of a typical elementary particle $\sim…
Scale invariance is a central organizing principle in physics, underlying phenomena that range from critical behaviour in statistical mechanics to transport and chaos in nonlinear dynamical systems. Here we present a unified and physically…
Starting from a critical analysis of recently reported surprisingly large uncertainties in length and position measurements deduced within the framework of quantum gravity, we embark on an investigation both of the correlation structure of…
Planck-scale physics challenges the classical smooth-spacetime picture by introducing quantum fluctuations that imply a nontrivial spacetime microstructure. We present a framework that encodes these fluctuations by promoting local scale…
The paper deals with a modified theory of gravity and the cosmological consequences. Instead of concerning the field equations directly, we modify a conformally-related and equivalent equation, such that a spontaneous symmetry breaking at…
With the discovery of a particle that seems rather consistent with the minimal Standard Model Higgs boson, attention turns to questions of naturalness, fine-tuning, and what they imply for physics beyond the Standard Model and its discovery…
Despite the enormous significance of the Higgs potential in the context of the Standard Model of electroweak interactions and in Grand Unified Theories, its ultimate origin is fundamentally unknown and must be introduced by hand in…
The positive energy theorem precludes the possibility of Minkowski flat space decaying by any mechanism. In certain circumstances, however, large quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field could arise---not only at the Planck scale,…
We argue that identifying the electroweak Higgs particle with the extra components of the gauge field in $4+d$ dimensions provides a solution to the hierarchy problem. The absence of ultraviolate quadratic divergences is due to the fact…
The so-called metastability bound asserts that an unnaturally small Higgs mass is a necessary condition for electroweak vacuum metastability, offering a new approach towards solving the hierarchy problem. So far, this result relies on the…
The existence of a new fundamental scale may lead to modified dispersion relations for particles at high energies. Such modifications seem to be realized with the Planck scale in certain descriptions of quantum gravity. We apply effective…
To connect supergravity with the real world, a highly non-trivial requirement is complete spontaneous supersymmetry breaking in an approximately flat four-dimensional space-time. In no-scale supergravity models, this naturally happens at…
We discuss the cosmological constant puzzle and possible connections to the (meta-)stability of the Higgs vacuum suggested by recent LHC results. A possible explanation involves new critical phenomena in the ultraviolet, close to the Planck…
The cosmological consequences of a simple scalar field model for the generation of Newton's constant through the spontaneous breaking of scale invariance in a curved space-time are again presented and discussed. Such a model leads to a…
The fundamental laws of physics are required to be invariant under local spatial scale change. In 3-dimensional space, this leads to a variation in Planck constant \hbar and speed of light c. They vary as \hbar ~ a^(1/2) and c ~ a^(-1/2), a…
The basic idea that gravity can be a long-wavelength effect {\it induced} by the peculiar ground state of an underlying quantum field theory leads to consider the implications of spontaneous symmetry breaking through an elementary scalar…