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"Astrology & Alchemy" in the SM
Peter Woit links to this terrific little paper on the arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/0609/0609274.pdf
hep-ph/0609274
The Standard Model: Alchemy and Astrology
Authors: Joseph D. Lykken
Comments: 12 pages, 0 figures, review talk from "Physics at LHC", Krakow, 3-8 July 2006
Report-no: FERMILAB-CONF-06-347-T
An brief unconventional review of Standard Model physics, containing no plots.
For starters, just consider this little couple of paragraphs on the Higgs boson:
Peter Woit links to this terrific little paper on the arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/0609/0609274.pdf
hep-ph/0609274
The Standard Model: Alchemy and Astrology
Authors: Joseph D. Lykken
Comments: 12 pages, 0 figures, review talk from "Physics at LHC", Krakow, 3-8 July 2006
Report-no: FERMILAB-CONF-06-347-T
An brief unconventional review of Standard Model physics, containing no plots.
For starters, just consider this little couple of paragraphs on the Higgs boson:
Joseph D. Likken said:Because we have forbidden higher dimension operators by hand, the
Standard Model has no explicit cutoff dependence. However, if the Higgs
self-coupling is too large – corresponding to a physical Higgs boson mass
greater than about 180 GeV – then the SM generates its own ultraviolet
cutoff [tex]\Lambda_{LP}[/tex] . This is because λ runs logarithmically with energy scale, and if λ is large enough at the electroweak scale the sign of the effect is to increase λ at higher energies. At some energy scale [tex]\Lambda_{LP}[/tex] the coupling hits a Landau pole and the electroweak sector of the Standard Model breaks down.
If the Higgs self-coupling at the electroweak scale is too small – corre-
sponding to a physical Higgs boson mass less than about 130 GeV – then
the running goes the other way, and at some high energy scale the sign of
this quartic coupling goes negative. At best, this destabilizes the vacuum;
at worst, theories with this kind of disease are unphysical. One could at-
tempt to compensate by invoking dimension 6 Higgs self–couplings, but this would violate one of our defining theoretical inputs.
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