A primary goal of present and future colliders is measuring the Higgs couplings to Standard Model (SM) particles. Any observed deviation from the SM predictions for these couplings is a sign of new physics whose energy scale can be bounded from above by requiring tree-level unitarity. In this paper, we extend previous work on unitarity bounds from the Higgs cubic coupling to Higgs couplings to vector bosons and top quarks. We find that HL-LHC measurements of these couplings compatible with current experimental bounds may point to a scale that can be explored at the HL-LHC or a next-generation collider. Our approach is completely model-independent: we assume only that there are no light degrees of freedom below the scale of new physics, and allow arbitrary values for the infinitely many couplings beyond the SM as long as they are in agreement with current measurements. We also extend and clarify the methodology of this analysis, and show that if the scale of new physics is above the TeV scale, then the deviations can be described by the leading higher-dimension gauge invariant operator, as in the SM effective field theory.
Inspired by the Contino-Pomarol-Rattazzi mechanism we explore scenarios with a very light (1 keV to 10 GeV) radion which could be associated with the suppression of the electroweak contribution to vacuum energy. We construct explicit, realistic models that realize this mechanism and explore the phenomenological constraints on this class of models. Compared with axion-like particles in this mass range, the bounds from SN 1987a and from cosmology can be much weaker, depending on the mass of the radion and its coupling to other particles. With couplings suppressed by a scale lower than 100 TeV, much of the mass window from 100 keV to 10 GeV is still open.
We adopt a bottom-up Effective Field Theory (EFT) approach to derive a model-independent Veltman condition to cancel out the quadratic divergences in the Higgs mass. We show using the equivalence theorem that all the deviations in the Higgs couplings to the
and
from the SM predictions should vanish. We argue based on tree-level unitarity that any new physics that naturally cancels out the quadratic divergences should be
TeV. We show that the level of fine-tuning required is
unless the UV sector has a symmetry that forces the satisfaction of the model-independent Veltman condition, in which case all fine-tuning is eliminated. We also conjecture that, if no new physics that couples to the Higgs is observed up to
TeV, or if the Higgs couplings to the SM particles conform to the SM predictions, then the Higgs either does not couple to any UV sector or is fine-tuned.
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