Theory seminar (11am): Javier G. Subils: Mass Hierarchies from Complex Fixed Point Collision

Thursday 30 May 2024, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Amsterdam

Colloquium Room

Our fundamental description of the Universe is filled with "unnatural" hierarchies. Think, for instance, of the Higgs mass being 17 orders of magnitude smaller than the Planck mass. It is justified to ask what kind of Wilsonian dynamics may give rise to such hierarchies. In my talk will review a mechanism in which a pair of complex-conjugate fixed points that lie close to the real axis generates a large mass hierarchy in the real renormalization group flow that passes in between them. We will investigate whether this could lead to the presence of a light dilaton in the spectrum of the corresponding theory. In particular, I will present recent progress in trying to tackle this question by means of gauge/gravity duality.