Self-Organized Higgs Criticality

Speaker: Jay Hubisz

I will discuss how the critical point for a Higgs sector may be made a dynamical attractor in a way that parallels similar phenomena in statistical physics such as the sand-pile model, or fault slippage in earthquakes. In this construction, a modulus field has a potential which has (meta)stable minima precisely at points where, in the low energy effective theory, the Higgs field mass is vanishing. I will discuss how quantum corrections are not expected to spoil this Higgs criticality, and how there are no ultralight particles expected, in seeming violation of expectations from naive application of effective field theory.