Related papers: Sliding Naturalness
The strong CP problem of QCD is at heart a problem of naturalness: why is the F\tilde{F} term highly suppressed in the QCD Lagrangian when it seems necessary to explain why there are three and not four light pions? The most elegant solution…
One class of solutions to the strong CP problem relies on generalized parity symmetries. A minimal model of this type, constructed by Babu and Mohapatra and based on a softly broken parity symmetry, has the remarkable property that…
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 consider a model based on the supersymmetric QCD theory with N_c=2 and N_f=3. The theory is strongly coupled at the infrared scale \Lambda_H. Its low energy effective theory below \Lambda_H is described by the supersymmetric standard…
Motivated by a solution to the strong CP problem we propose a model where a new heavy neutral CP-even Higgs boson couples to vector-like quarks enhancing its production cross section whose dominant decays are into weak bosons. The masses of…
We calculate the strength of the electroweak phase transition in a supersymmetric model with four chiral generations. The additional chiral fermions (and scalar partners) lower the critical temperature and thus strengthen the first-order…
We present a brief review of recent attempts to construct effective theories to describe the breaking of the electroweak symmetry in extensions of the Standard Model with new strongly interacting dynamics around the TeV scale. Particular…
Whether the Standard Model electroweak vacuum is stable, metastable or unstable depends crucially on the top mass (and, to a lesser extent, on other measurable quantities). These topics are reviewed and updated by taking into account the…
We exhibit a novel solution of the strong CP problem, which does not involve any massless particles. The low energy effective Lagrangian of our model involves a discrete spacetime independent axion field which can be thought of as a…
A recent work combined the popular left-right parity (LR) and Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetries to explain the alignment in quark masses. Since axions may not exist, we break PQ softly and discover a new solution to the strong CP problem.…
Cosmological relaxation of the electroweak scale is an attractive scenario addressing the gauge hierarchy problem. Its main actor, the relaxion, is a light spin-zero field which dynamically relaxes the Higgs mass with respect to its natural…
We investigate a minimal singlet-scalar extension to the Standard Model that achieves a strong first-order electroweak phase transition. The singlet can be naturally light because of an approximate shift symmetry and no extra hierarchy…
We construct composite Higgs models admitting a weakly coupled Seiberg dual description. We focus on the possibility that only the up-type Higgs is an elementary field, while the down-type Higgs arises as a composite hadron. The model,…
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…
We study the occurrence of a strong first-order electroweak phase transition in composite Higgs models. Minimal constructions realising this scenario are based on the coset SO(6)/SO(5) which delivers an extended Higgs sector with an…
The breaking of the electroweak symmetry, and origin of the associated ``weak scale,'' may be due to a new strong interaction. Theoretical developments over the past decade have led to viable models and mechanisms that are consistent with…
Electroweak precision data have been extensively used to constrain models containing physics beyond that of the Standard Model. When the model contains Higgs scalars in representations other than singlets or doublets, and hence rho not…
We investigate the phenomenological constraints on a model where, besides the standard model Higgs sector, there is an effective new strong interaction acting on the third generation of quarks and characterized by a $\theta$-like term. This…
Considering the one-loop calculation of the oblique S and T parameters, we have presented a study of the viability of strongly-coupled scenarios of electroweak symmetry breaking with a light Higgs-like boson. The calculation has been done…
With the 8 TeV LHC run now concluded, the first consequences of the experimental results on the supersymmetric parameter space can be drawn. On one hand, the negative direct searches place more and more stringent bounds on the mass of…