Sep 25 – 27, 2024
IMSc Chennai
Asia/Kolkata timezone

Cosmological selection of a small weak scale from a large vacuum energy: a minimal approach

Sep 26, 2024, 2:30 PM
30m
Ramanujan Auditorium (IMSc Chennai)

Ramanujan Auditorium

IMSc Chennai

Speaker

Rick Sandeepan Gupta (TIFR Mumbai)

Description

We present a minimal cosmological solution to the hierarchy problem. Our model consists of a light pseudoscalar and an extra Higgs doublet in addition to the field content of the Standard Model. We consider a landscape of vacua with varying values of the electroweak vacuum expectation value (VEV). The vacuum energy in our model peaks in a region of the landscape where the electroweak VEV is small. During inflation such regions of the landscape with maximal vacuum energy, dominate the universe in volume,The pseudoscalar potential in our model is that of a completely generic pseudogoldstone boson −not requiring the clockwork mechanism–and its field value never exceeds its decay constant or the Planck scale. Our mechanism is robust to the variation of other model parameters in the landscape along with the electroweak VEV. It also predicts a precise and falsifiable relationship between the masses and couplings of the different Higgs boson mass-eigenstates. Moreover, the pseudoscalar in our model can account for the observed dark matter relic density.

Presentation materials