High Energy Theory Group Meeting: Conformal Higgs Gravity

Abstract:

It is shown that gravitation emerges naturally from the standard model of particle physics if local scale invariance is imposed in the context of a single conformal theory. Doing so resolves major puzzles afflicting the standard models of particle physics and cosmology, clearly indicating these to be artifacts stemming from universally applying the system of units selected here and now. In addition to the three known fundamental interactions mediated by gauge bosons, a scalar-tensor interaction is also accomodated by the theory; its inertial and gravitational sectors are characterized by the vanishing and non-vanishing contributions to the Weyl tensor, respectively. Gravitation is thus confined to the propagating degrees of freedom of physical systems; it is not a fundamental interaction, much like inertia is not. Both inertia and gravity are viewed in the proposed framework as collective phenomena, with characteristic gravitational Planck scale devoid of fundamental meaning; consequently, 
mass hierarchy and Higgs mass instability concerns are avoided altogether. Only standard model particles gravitate; dark matter and dark energy are inertial phenomena. On cosmological scales, the dynamical vacuum-like Higgs self-coupling accounts for dark energy, and its observed proximity at present to the energy density of nonrelativistic matter is merely a consistency requirement. Spatially varying vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field could very likely account for cold dark matter on both galactic and cosmological scales.