Predictive Landscapes and New Physics at a TeV

TL;DR

This paper introduces a landscape-based framework coupling the Standard Model to a vast array of vacua, explaining the hierarchy and cosmological constant problems while predicting new TeV-scale physics and dark matter candidates.

Contribution

It develops a novel landscape approach with field theory vacua to address hierarchy and cosmological constant issues, predicting TeV-scale new physics.

Findings

Predicts new physics at the TeV scale including Higgsinos and dark matter candidates.

Provides a framework linking landscape vacua to the hierarchy and cosmological constant problems.

Suggests gauge coupling unification near 10^{14} GeV.

Abstract

We propose that the Standard Model is coupled to a sector with an enormous landscape of vacua, where only the dimensionful parameters--the vacuum energy and Higgs masses--are finely "scanned" from one vacuum to another, while dimensionless couplings are effectively fixed. This allows us to preserve achievements of the usual unique-vacuum approach in relating dimensionless couplings while also accounting for the success of the anthropic approach to the cosmological constant problem. It can also explain the proximity of the weak scale to the geometric mean of the Planck and vacuum energy scales. We realize this idea with field theory landscapes consisting of $N$ fields and $2^N$ vacua, where the fractional variation of couplings is smaller than $1/\sqrt{N}$. These lead to a variety of low-energy theories including the Standard Model, the MSSM, and Split SUSY. This picture suggests sharp new rules for model-building, providing the first framework in which to simultaneously address the cosmological constant problem together with the big and little hierarchy problems. Requiring the existence of atoms can fix ratio of the QCD scale to the weak scale, thereby providing a possible solution to the hierarchy problem as well as related puzzles such as the $\mu$ and doublet-triplet splitting problems. We also present new approaches to the hierarchy problem, where the fine-tuning of the Higgs mass to exponentially small scales is understood by even more basic environmental requirements such as vacuum stability and the existence of baryons. These theories predict new physics at the TeV scale, including a dark matter candidate. The simplest theory has weak-scale "Higgsinos" as the only new particles charged under the Standard Model, with gauge coupling unification near $10^{14}$ GeV.