Numerical study of a cosmological relaxation model of the Higgs boson mass

TL;DR

This paper numerically investigates a cosmological relaxation model for the Higgs boson mass, exploring how multiple three-form fields influence the evolution and stabilization of the Higgs vacuum during inflation.

Contribution

It provides a numerical analysis of Higgs vacuum evolution in a cosmological relaxation framework, highlighting the effect of multiple three-form fields on the relaxation process.

Findings

Increased number of three-forms accelerates Higgs VEV convergence.

More brane charges lead to faster vacuum stabilization.

Additional charges mimic more brane nucleations at late times.

Abstract

In light of no discovered new physics at the LHC, ideas which tackle the Hierarchy Problem without novelties around the TeV scale must be taken seriously. Such is a cosmological relaxation model of the Higgs mass, proposed in the pre-LHC era, which does not rely on new physics below the Planck scale. This scenario introduces a different notion of naturalness according to which the vacuum with a small expectation value of the Higgs field corresponds to an infinitely enhanced entropy point of the vacuum landscape that becomes an attractor of cosmological inflationary evolution. In this framework we study numerically the evolution of the Higgs VEV. We model the inflationary vacuum-to-vacuum transitions that are triggered by nucleation of branes charged under three-form fields as a random walk. In particular, we investigate the impact of the number of coupled three-forms on the convergence rate of the Higgs VEV. We discover an enhanced rate with increasing number of brane charges. Moreover, we show that for late times the inclusion of more charges is equivalent to additional brane nucleations.