Electroweak Symmetry Breaking, Intermediate Regulators and Physics Beyond the Standard Model

TL;DR

The paper argues that the small Higgs mass is not unnatural and challenges the common belief that new physics must appear at accessible energy scales to explain it, especially after the 2012 discovery of a Higgs-like boson.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the small Higgs mass does not necessarily imply the existence of new physics at current energy scales, countering prevailing naturalness arguments.

Findings

Small Higgs mass is not inherently unnatural.

No requirement for new physics at TeV scales based on naturalness.

The 2012 Higgs discovery does not contradict the absence of new physics.

Abstract

According to the long-standing received wisdom, a "small" value of the Higgs mass - as for instance implied by general unitarity constraints - is highly "unnatural" and essentially $\mbox{requires}$ new physics to be present at or near currently accessible energy scales. Following the discovery of a new, Higgslike boson at the LHC facility in 2012, but with no sign of new physics after having explored a large region of parameter space, a dilemma thus seems to present itself : either the newly discovered boson is indeed the long-sought Higgs boson of the standard model of particle physics (or some appropriate variant of that model) and the new physics at the TeV scale, supposedly required by the naturalness argument, is still waiting to be discovered, possibly by LHC-II, or the identification of the new boson as the Higgs cannot be maintained. It is shown that this apparent dilemma is in fact a false one, in that nothing in contemporary particle physics dictates that a small Higgs mass be unnatural in any way.