Theory seminar: Tevong You: EFT, positivity, and the electroweak hierarchy

Thursday 7 Mar 2024, 16:00 → 17:00 Europe/Amsterdam

The Standard Model (SM) is an Effective Field Theory (EFT) with an electroweak hierarchy problem associated to an unnaturally light Higgs. After introducing the concept of the SM EFT and the naturalness problem, I will present the possibility that an unnatural hierarchy between certain higher-dimensional operator coefficients in a low-energy EFT would necessarily imply that the Higgs' vacuum expectation value is also hierarchically smaller than the EFT cut-off, assuming the EFT emerged from a unitary, causal and local UV completion. Future colliders may have the sensitivity to infer such a pattern of coefficients for a little hierarchy with an EFT cut-off up to O(10) TeV.