Neutral Naturalness from Orbifold Higgs Models

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Neutral Naturalness from Orbifold Higgs Models

Nathaniel Craig, Simon Knapen, and Pietro Longhi

Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 061803 – Published 13 February 2015

Abstract

We present a general class of natural theories in which the Higgs boson is a pseudo-Goldstone boson in an orbifolded gauge theory. The symmetry protecting the Higgs boson at low energies is an accidental global symmetry of the quadratic action, rather than a full continuous symmetry. The lightest degrees of freedom protecting the weak scale carry no standard model (SM) quantum numbers and interact with visible matter principally through the Higgs portal. This opens the door to the systematic study of “neutral naturalness”: natural theories with SM-neutral states that are as yet untested by the LHC.

Received 16 November 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.061803

Authors & Affiliations

Nathaniel Craig^1,2,*, Simon Knapen^2,3,4,†, and Pietro Longhi^2,‡

¹Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA
²Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854, USA
³Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
⁴Theoretical Physics Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA