Dartmouth Events

Abstract: Conventional solutions to the hierarchy problem based on symmetries predict new colored particles with large production cross sections at the LHC.  The absence of signals from these new particles has generated interest in solutions that do not rely on colored top partners.  The anthropic principle, by contrast, can explain apparent fine tunings without the need for new light degrees of freedom, or indeed, any observable signatures at all.  The most famous application of this principle is Weinberg's solution to the cosmological constant problem, in which the existence of galaxies or other large scale structures is predicated on the smallness of the cosmological constant, along with a landscape of vacua in which the cosmological constant is effectively scanned.  In this talk, I will describe a putative model of the landscape in which the number of vacua, and thus the ability of the landscape to scan the cosmological constant, is a function of the electroweak scale.  A single anthropic criterion, namely the existence of galaxies, may then explain both the smallness of the cosmological constant as well as the lightness of the Higgs.  Unlike conventional anthropic explanations, our model is testable: it requires new degrees of freedom coupled to the Higgs which may be light enough to produce at the LHC or future colliders.