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Natural tuning: towards a proof of concept

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Abstract

The cosmological constant problem and the absence of new natural physics at the electroweak scale, if confirmed by the LHC, may either indicate that the nature is fine-tuned or that a refined notion of naturalness is required. We construct a family of toy UV complete quantum theories providing a proof of concept for the second possibility. Low energy physics is described by a tuned effective field theory, which exhibits relevant interactions not protected by any symmetries and separated by an arbitrary large mass gap from the new “gravitational” physics, represented by a set of irrelevant operators. Nevertheless, the only available language to describe dynamics at all energy scales does not require any fine-tuning. The interesting novel feature of this construction is that UV physics is not described by a fixed point, but rather exhibits asymptotic fragility. Observation of additional unprotected scalars at the LHC would be a smoking gun for this scenario. Natural tuning also favors TeV scale unification.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, Department of Physics, New York University, New York, NY, 10003, U.S.A.

    Sergei Dubovsky, Victor Gorbenko & Mehrdad Mirbabayi

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  1. Sergei Dubovsky
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  2. Victor Gorbenko
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  3. Mehrdad Mirbabayi
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Correspondence to Mehrdad Mirbabayi.

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ArXiv ePrint: 1305.6939

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Dubovsky, S., Gorbenko, V. & Mirbabayi, M. Natural tuning: towards a proof of concept. J. High Energ. Phys. 2013, 45 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP09(2013)045

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