HEP Theory Journal Club

Axionic landscape for marginal Higgs stability

Jim Cline

McGill

The values of m_h and m_t are curiously close to the edge of disaster, if nothing new happens to stabilize the Higgs field at very high scales, suggesting an anthropic reason for taking these values. I present a simple model providing landscape of vacua that could explain this, using the minima of an axionic field with a nonperiodic potential (monodromy). I claim that relative probabilities of the different vacuum states populated during inflation are calculable, offering a potential solution to the measure problem in this context.