Joint Theory Seminar
Speaker: Sal Lombardo
Title: Continuum Naturalness
Host: John Terning
Room: 432
Abstract: The LHC has put the naturalness paradigm under pressure since one generally expects new colored resonances at the TeV scale to address the hierarchy problem. There exists another possibility, however. New dynamics responsible for furnishing a pseudo-goldstone composite Higgs may have a gapped continuum of colored excitations, in which case the top partners and vector resonances appear as branch cuts rather than poles in scattering amplitudes. The new colored states in this scenario cannot be described as Breit-Wigner resonances, drastically changing their LHC phenomenology. I will present a model in which a fermionic top partner continuum cuts off the quadratic divergence of the Higgs mass and show that direct experimental constraints on such a scenario can be weakened relative to traditional composite Higgs models.
