Landscapes at Colliders

TL;DR

This paper explores the possibility that a sector of the landscape of metastable vacua, which could explain the cosmological constant, might be accessible at colliders, leading to unique signatures like large-multiplicity final states and exotic Higgs decays.

Contribution

It introduces the idea that certain long-lived vacua could be within experimental reach and analyzes their potential collider signatures, including a specific model linking the cosmological constant and Higgs mass.

Findings

Large-multiplicity final states could be detectable at colliders.

Exotic Higgs decays may serve as signatures of the landscape sector.

A model connects the small CC and Higgs mass via anthropic reasoning.

Abstract

Theories with a large number of long-lived metastable vacua are our only concrete explanation for the puzzling value of the Cosmological Constant (CC). The energy scales where these vacua are realized are unknown. In this work, we consider the possibility that a sector of this landscape of vacua is within experimental reach and discuss its signatures at colliders. We find that striking large-multiplicity final states might have gone undetected due to their relatively small total energy. In particular, this could lead to new exotic Higgs decays, which are both intriguing and challenging to search for. In addition to a general phenomenological analysis of these theories, we also discuss an explicit model where the small values of the CC and the Higgs mass are jointly explained by Weinberg's anthropic argument and a low energy landscape.