The Higgs and the Excessive Success of the Standard Model

TL;DR

The paper discusses the discovery of the Higgs boson at 125 GeV and the surprising lack of new physics signals at the LHC, highlighting the naturalness problem and exploring theoretical approaches to address it.

Contribution

It reviews various theoretical ideas and proposals developed to resolve the naturalness problem in light of LHC findings.

Findings

Higgs boson discovered at 125 GeV

No signals of new physics observed at LHC

Naturalness remains a central theoretical challenge

Abstract

The LHC runs at 7 and 8 TeV have led to the discovery of the Higgs boson at 125 GeV which will remain as one of the major physics discoveries of our time. Another very important result was the surprising absence of any signals of new physics that, if confirmed in the continuation of the LHC experiments, is going to drastically change our vision of the field. Indeed the theoretical criterium of naturalness required the presence of new physics at the TeV scale. At present the indication is that Nature does not too much care about our notion of naturalness. Still the argument for naturalness is a solid one and one is facing a puzzling situation. We review the different ideas and proposals that are being considered in the theory community to cope with the naturalness problem.