The Lee Wick Standard Model

TL;DR

The Lee-Wick Standard Model introduces higher derivative terms to address the Higgs mass hierarchy problem, proposing a novel interpretation to maintain unitarity and stability despite potential instabilities.

Contribution

It reviews the development of the Lee-Wick Standard Model, which incorporates higher derivative kinetic terms with a unique interpretation to preserve unitarity and stability.

Findings

Higher derivative terms improve loop convergence.

Lee-Wick interpretation allows for stable, unitary theories.

Potential resolution of the Higgs hierarchy problem.

Abstract

This article reviews some recent work on a version of the standard model (the Lee-Wick standard model) that contains higher derivative kinetic terms that improve the convergence of loop diagrams removing the quadratic divergence in the Higgs boson mass. Naively higher derivative theories of this type are not acceptable since the higher derivative terms either cause instabilities (from negative energies) or a loss of unitarity (from negative norm states). Lee and Wick provided an interpretation for such theories arguing that theories with higher derivative kinetic terms can be unitary and stable if the states associated with the massive propagator poles, that arise from the higher derivatives, have widths and hence decay and are not in the spectrum of the theory.