Related papers: Landscapes at Colliders
If the effective cosmological constant $\Lambda$ of the present universe is due to physical processes in the early universe operating at temperatures just above the electroweak energy scale, it is possible that new particles with…
It is pointed out that a collider experiment involves a local contribution to the energy-momentum tensor, a circumstance which not a common feature of the current state of the Universe at large characterized by the cosmological constant…
The cosmological constant problem is a failure of naturalness and suggests that a fine-tuning mechanism is at work, which may also address the hierarchy problem. An example -- supported by Weinberg's successful prediction of the…
The observed constraints on the variability of the proton to electron mass ratio $\mu$ and the fine structure constant $\alpha$ are used to establish constraints on the variability of the Quantum Chromodynamic Scale and a combination of the…
We discuss aspects of the problem of assigning probabilities in eternal inflation. In particular, we investigate a recent suggestion that the lowest energy de Sitter vacuum in the landscape is effectively stable. The associated proposal for…
The phenomenology of the FLRW models with non-vanishing cosmological constant (CC) is briefly surveyed in the light of the recent astrophysical and cosmological observations. A subset of these models, which probably includes the world where…
New physics at the TeV scale or lower may destabilise the electroweak vacuum. How low could the vacuum instability scale be? This fundamental question may be tied to a deeper understanding of the Higgs potential and its associated hierarchy…
We consider the question of asymptotic observables in cosmology. We assume that string theory contains a landscape of vacua, and that metastable de Sitter regions can decay to zero cosmological constant by bubble nucleation. The asymptotic…
The scalar potential of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) admits the existence of vacua with non-vanishing expectation values of electrically and color charged fields. If such minima are deep enough, the physical electroweak…
We show how the scalar field, a candidate of quintessence, in a proposed model of the scalar-tensor theories of gravity provides a way to understand a small but nonzero cosmological constant as indicated by recent observations. A particular…
It has recently been conjectured that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua, and that quintessence explains the current epoch of accelerated cosmic expansion. A proposed, key prediction of this scenario is time-varying couplings in…
We argue that the study of the statistics of the landscape of string vacua provides the first potentially predictive -- and also falsifiable -- framework for string theory. The question of whether the theory does or does not predict low…
The empirical mass of the Higgs boson suggests small to vanishing values of the quartic Higgs self--coupling and the corresponding beta function at the Planck scale, leading to degenerate vacua. This leads us to suggest that the measured…
We consider an ultra-light scalar coupled to the Higgs in the presence of heavier new physics. In the electroweak broken phase the Higgs gives a tree-level contribution to the light-scalar potential, while new physics contributes at loop…
We discuss the possibility of detecting a Higgs boson in future collider experiments if large extra dimensions are realized in nature. In such a case, the Higgs boson can decay invisibly by oscillating into a graviscalar Kaluza-Klein (KK)…
The peculiar value of $\theta$ is a challenge to the notion of an anthropic landscape. We briefly review the possibility that a suitable axion might arise from an anthropic requirement of dark matter. We then consider an alternative…
In the picture of eternal inflation as driven by a scalar potential with multiple minima, our observable universe resides inside one of many bubbles formed from transitions out of a false vacuum. These bubbles necessarily collide, upsetting…
With no free parameter (except the string scale $M_S$), dynamical flux compactification in Type IIB string theory determines both the cosmological constant (vacuum energy density) $\Lambda$ and the Planck mass $M_P$ in terms of $M_S$, thus…
We suggest that the solution to the cosmological vacuum energy puzzle does not require any new field beyond the standard model, but rather can be explained as a result of the interaction of the infrared sector of the effective theory of…
If the mechanism responsible for the smallness of the vacuum energy is consistent with local quantum field theory, general arguments suggest the existence of at least one unobserved scalar particle with Compton wavelength bounded from below…