Electroweak Symmetry Breaking, Intermediate Regulators and Physics Beyond the Standard Model

Abstract

According to the long-standing received wisdom, a "small" value of the Higgs mass - as for instance implied by general unitarity constraints - is highly "unnatural" and essentially $\mbox{requires}$ new physics to be present at or near currently accessible energy scales. Following the discovery of a new, Higgslike boson at the LHC facility in 2012, but with no sign of new physics after having explored a large region of parameter space, a dilemma thus seems to present itself : either the newly discovered boson is indeed the long-sought Higgs boson of the standard model of particle physics (or some appropriate variant of that model) and the new physics at the TeV scale, supposedly required by the naturalness argument, is still waiting to be discovered, possibly by LHC-II, or the identification of the new boson as the Higgs cannot be maintained. It is shown that this apparent dilemma is in fact a false one, in that nothing in contemporary particle physics dictates that a small Higgs mass be unnatural in any way.