NEXT ASYMMETRY WEBINAR: Wednesday, February 4th at 4:00 PM (CET)
Speaker: Pablo Sesma (IFAE)
Title: Weak Scale Triggers in the SMEFT.
Abstract: Weak-scale triggers are local operators whose expectation values respond directly to changes in the Higgs mass-squared. They are an essential ingredient in many cosmological proposals that aim to select the electroweak scale, even when the underlying dynamics differ widely. In this talk I will present a systematic SMEFT analysis of candidate triggers up to dimension six and show that none can address the hierarchy problem parametrically far above the electroweak scale. The practical takeaway is that it is most efficient to organize searches around the characteristic signatures of the few trigger operators that are already known, offering a concrete way to discover, or robustly exclude, a broad class of cosmological solutions to the hierarchy problem.