Related papers: Standard Model Meets Gravity: Electroweak Symmetry…
The cosmological relaxation of the electroweak scale has been proposed as a mechanism to address the hierarchy problem of the Standard Model. A field, the relaxion, rolls down its potential and, in doing so, scans the squared mass parameter…
We study a scale-invariant model of quadratic gravity with a non-minimally coupled scalar field. We focus on cosmological solutions and find that scale invariance is spontaneously broken and a mass scale naturally emerges. Before the…
The discovery of Higgs mechanism within the context of spontaneous symmetry breaking has offered a new perspective on the early time cosmic inflation and also on the relationship between elementary particles and dark energy, believed to…
We present an update of the global Standard Model (SM) fit to electroweak precision data under the assumption that the new particle discovered at the LHC is the SM Higgs boson. In this scenario all parameters entering the calculations of…
We propose a model for cosmic inflation which is based on an effective description of strongly interacting, nonsupersymmetric matter within the framework of dynamical Abelian projection and centerization. The underlying gauge symmetry is…
We refine and update the metastability constraint on the Standard Model top and Higgs masses, by analytically including gravitational corrections to the vacuum decay rate. Present best-fit ranges of the top and Higgs masses mostly lie in…
The current experimentally measured parameters of the Standard Model (SM) suggest that our Universe lies in a metastable electroweak vacuum, where the Higgs field is prone to vacuum decay to a lower state with catastrophic consequences. Our…
Most of the inflationary models that are in agreement with the Planck data rely on the presence of non-renormalizable operators. If the connection to low energy particle physics is made, the renormalization group (RG) introduces a…
In this talk, I shall first discuss the standard model Higgs mechanism and then highlight some of its deficiencies making a case for the need to go beyond the standard model (BSM). The BSM tour will be guided by symmetry arguments. I shall…
We propose a novel mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking in supersymmetric models, as the one recently discussed by Birkedal, Chacko and Gaillard, in which the Standard Model Higgs doublet is a pseudo-Goldstone boson of some global…
We construct a supersymmetric version of the Standard Model which contains a long-lived metastable vacuum. In this vacuum supersymmetry is broken and the electroweak symmetry is Higgsed, and we identify it with the physical ground state of…
We study quantum effects in Higgs inflation in the Palatini formulation of gravity, in which the metric and connection are treated as independent variables. We exploit the fact that the cutoff, above which perturbation theory breaks down,…
The spontaneous symmetry breaking theory of gravity is examined, assuming that the vacuum expectation value of the standard model Higgs is also responsible for the generation of the Planck mass. In this model the physical Higgs couples only…
We consider models of chaotic inflation driven by the real parts of a conjugate pair of Higgs superfields involved in the spontaneous breaking of a grand unification symmetry at a scale assuming its Supersymmetric value. Employing Kaehler…
We present a comparative study of inflation in two theories of quadratic gravity with {\it gauged} scale symmetry: 1) the original Weyl quadratic gravity and 2) the theory defined by a similar action but in the Palatini approach obtained by…
We propose to study a smooth variant of the $\mu$-hybrid inflation model and a non-minimal Higgs model of inflation with quartic non-minimal coupling between the Higgs field and gravity within the context of a realistic GUT gauge group…
We present an introduction to cosmic inflation in the framework of Palatini gravity, which provides an intriguing alternative to the conventional metric formulation of gravity. In the latter, only the metric specifies the spacetime…
Models of Gauge-Higgs unification in extra dimensions offer a very elegant playground where one can study electroweak symmetry breaking. The nicest feature is that gauge symmetry itself protects the Higgs potential from divergences, thus…
Quantum gravity computations suggest the existence of an ultraviolet and an infrared fixed point where quantum scale invariance emerges as an exact symmetry. We discuss a particular variable gravity model for the crossover between these…
Supersymmetry-based hybrid inflation models (referred to as `spontaneously broken supersymmetry' by the Planck collaboration) are attractive for several reasons, including the appealing feature that inflation is associated with local gauge…