Where does the Higgs boson come from? The CERN Theoretical Physics department hosted a workshop to explore unconventional explanations for the Higgs boson's properties and origin. While no evidence for 'natural' solutions has been found, future data from ATLAS and CMS experiments will guide the pat
The Higgs boson is the simplest known particle: a “” with no charge or spin. As with all elementary particles, it is an excitation, or quantum, of a more fundamental entity called a field – the uniquely featureless Brout–Englert–Higgs field, which fills all space uniformly.
Aware of this paradox long before the Higgs boson was discovered, and guided by the possible existence of particles and forces beyond those described by the Standard Model, physicists have come up with. One is that the Higgs boson is made of more basic entities held together by very strong forces, which circumvents the impact of quantum corrections.
Enter Exotic Approaches to Naturalness, which drew on such concepts as generalised symmetries, ultraviolet/infrared mixing, weak-gravity conjectures and “magic zeroes” to try to explain the Higgs boson’s mass, and other unnatural numbers in physics. If the language is abstruse, it’s because participants of the February workshop were encouraged to challenge conventions and to plant seeds of ideas at the edge of knowledge – including those that reject the concept of naturalness entirely.
“This workshop provided us with a fantastic forum to bring a fresh perspective on naturalness problems, both in a variety of physical systems and for particle physics specifically,” says workshop co-organiser Tim Cohen of CERN. “Our community has been pondering the Higgs’s naturalness problem for decades, and yet many of us suspect that we have not found the right idea yet.
While theorists let their imaginations run free, the conclusion of the CERN workshop was clear: the path ahead will be guided by data. Larger samples of Higgs bosons to be collected by ATLAS and CMS in the coming years – and by experiments at a dedicated “Higgs factory” proposed to follow the LHC – will enable physicists to study the unique interaction of the Higgs boson with itself.
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