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Emergence of the electroweak scale through the Higgs portal

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Abstract

Having discovered a candidate for the final piece of the Standard Model, the Higgs boson, the question remains why its vacuum expectation value and its mass are so much smaller than the Planck scale (or any other high scale of new physics). One elegant solution was provided by Coleman and Weinberg, where all mass scales are generated from dimensionless coupling constants via dimensional transmutation. However, the original Coleman-Weinberg scenario predicts a Higgs mass which is too light; it is parametrically suppressed compared to the mass of the vectors bosons, and hence is much lighter than the observed value. In this paper we argue that a mass scale, generated via the Coleman-Weinberg mechanism in a hidden sector and then transmitted to the Standard Model through a Higgs portal, can naturally explain the smallness of the electroweak scale compared to the UV cutoff scale, and at the same time be consistent with the observed value. We analyse the phenomenology of such a model in the context of present and future colliders and low energy measurements.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, Department of Physics, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, U.K.

    Christoph Englert, V. V. Khoze & Michael Spannowsky

  2. Institut für theoretische Physik, Universität Heidelberg, Philosophenweg 16, 69120, Heidelberg, Germany

    Joerg Jaeckel

  3. Centre for Academic Practice, School of Education, Leazes Road, Durham, DH1 1TA, U.K.

    Michael Spannowsky

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  1. Christoph Englert
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  2. Joerg Jaeckel
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Correspondence to Christoph Englert.

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Englert, C., Jaeckel, J., Khoze, V.V. et al. Emergence of the electroweak scale through the Higgs portal. J. High Energ. Phys. 2013, 60 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP04(2013)060

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