Crunching Dilaton, Hidden Naturalness

Understand

We introduce a new approach to the Higgs naturalness problem, where the value of the Higgs mass is tied to cosmic stability and the possibility of a large observable Universe.

• The Higgs mixes with the dilaton of a CFT sector whose true ground state has a large negative vacuum energy.
• If the Higgs VEV is non-zero and below $\mathcal{O}({\rm TeV})$, the CFT also admits a second metastable vacuum, where the expansion history of the Universe is conventional.
• As a result, only Hubble patches with unnaturally small values of the Higgs mass support inflation and post-inflationary expansion, while all other patches rapidly crunch.