Natural Islands for a 125 GeV Higgs in the scale-invariant NMSSM

TL;DR

This paper investigates the feasibility of achieving a 125 GeV Higgs boson within the scale-invariant NMSSM without significant tuning, analyzing both perturbative and non-perturbative regimes and considering vacuum stability constraints.

Contribution

It provides an analytic and numerical analysis of the parameter space in the NMSSM for a natural 125 GeV Higgs, including the effects of perturbativity, non-perturbativity, and vacuum stability.

Findings

Perturbative NMSSM cannot naturally produce 125 GeV Higgs without tuning.

Allowing non-perturbativity introduces Landau poles near the weak scale.

Large A-terms expand parameter space but may require tuning.

Abstract

We study whether a 125 GeV standard model-like Higgs boson can be accommodated within the scale-invariant NMSSM in a way that is natural in all respects, i.e., not only is the stop mass and hence its loop contribution to Higgs mass of natural size, but we do not allow significant tuning of NMSSM parameters as well. We pursue as much as possible an analytic approach which gives clear insights on various ways to accommodate such a Higgs mass, while conducting complementary numerical analyses. We consider both scenarios with singlet-like state being heavier and lighter than SM-like Higgs. With A-terms being small, we find for the NMSSM to be perturbative up to GUT scale, it is not possible to get 125 GeV Higgs mass, which is true even if we tune parameters of NMSSM. If we allow some of the couplings to become non-perturbative below the GUT scale, then the non-tuned option implies that the singlet self-coupling, kappa, is larger than the singlet-Higgs coupling, lambda, which itself is order 1. This leads to a Landau pole for these couplings close to the weak scale, in particular below ~10^4 TeV. In both the perturbative and non-perturbative NMSSM, allowing large A_lambda, A_kappa gives "more room" to accommodate a 125 GeV Higgs, but a tuning of these A-terms may be needed. In our analysis we also conduct a careful study of the constraints on the parameter space from requiring global stability of the desired vacuum fitting a 125 GeV Higgs, which is complementary to existing literature. In particular, as the singlet-Higgs coupling lambda increases, vacuum stability becomes more serious of an issue.