Higgs and Dark Matter Hints of an Oasis in the Desert

Understand

Recent LHC results suggest a standard model (SM)-like Higgs boson in the vicinity of 125 GeV with no clear indications yet of physics beyond the SM.

• At the same time, the SM is incomplete, since additional dynamics are required to accommodate cosmological dark matter (DM).
• In this paper we show that interactions between weak scale DM and the Higgs which are strong enough to yield a thermal relic abundance consistent with observation can easily destabilize the electroweak vacuum or drive the theory into a non-perturbative regime at a low scale.
• As a consequence, new physics--beyond the DM itself--must enter at a cutoff well below the Planck scale and in some cases as low as O(10 - 1000 TeV), a range relevant to indirect probes of flavor and CP violation.