Affiliation:
1. Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA;
Abstract
Applying dimensional analysis to the Higgs mass leads one to predict new physics interactions that generate this mass at a scale of the order of 1 TeV. The question of what these interactions could be is known as the gauge hierarchy problem. Resolving this question has been a central aim of particle physics for the past few decades. Traditional solutions introduce new particles with masses below 1 TeV, but that prediction is now challenged by experiment. In this article, I review recent new approaches to the problem that do not require new particles at the TeV mass scale. I first discuss the relaxation approach, whereby the Higgs mass is made dynamical and is small at the absolute minimum of its potential. I then discuss the historical approach, whereby details about inflation and/or reheating after inflation cause the Higgs mass to be smaller than otherwise expected. Finally, I discuss solutions that use conditional probability, whereby conditioning on the fact that the cosmological constant is small automatically leads one to select vacua where the Higgs mass is also small.
Subject
Nuclear and High Energy Physics
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