Establishing the Isolated Standard Model

Understand

The goal of this article is to initiate a discussion on what it takes to claim "there is no new physics at the weak scale," namely that the Standard Model (SM) is "isolated." The lack of discovery of beyond the SM (BSM) physics suggests that this may be the case.

• But to truly establish this statement requires proving all "connected" BSM theories are false, which presents a significant challenge.
• We propose a general approach to quantitatively assess the current status and future prospects of establishing the isolated SM (ISM), which we give a reasonable definition of.
• We consider broad elements of BSM theories, and show many examples where current experimental results are not sufficient to verify the ISM.