Symmergent Gravity, Seesawic New Physics, and their Experimental Signatures

The standard model of elementary particles (SM) suffers from various problems, such as power-law ultraviolet (UV) sensitivity, exclusion of general relativity (GR), and absence of a dark matter candidate. The LHC experiments, according to which the TeV domain appears to be empty of new particles, started sidelining TeV-scale SUSY and other known cures of the UV sensitivity. In search for a remedy, in this work, it is revealed that affine curvature can emerge in a way restoring gauge symmetries explicitly broken by the UV cutoff. This emergent curvature cures the UV sensitivity and incorporates GR as symmetry-restoring emergent gravity ({\it symmergent gravity}, in brief) if a new physics sector (NP) exists to generate the Planck scale and if SM+NP is fermi-bose balanced. This setup, carrying fingerprints of trans-Planckian SUSY, predicts that gravity is Einstein (no higher-curvature terms), cosmic/gamma rays can originate from heavy NP scalars, and the UV cutoff might take right value to suppress the cosmological constant (alleviating fine-tuning with SUSY). The NP does not have to couple to the SM. In fact, NP-SM coupling can take any value from zero to $\Lambda^2_{SM}/\Lambda^2_{NP}$ if the SM is not to jump from $\Lambda_{SM}\approx 500\, {\rm GeV}$ to the NP scale $\Lambda_{NP}$. The zero coupling, certifying an undetectable NP, agrees with all the collider and dark matter bounds at present. The {\it seesawic} bound $\Lambda^2_{SM}/\Lambda^2_{NP}$, directly verifiable at colliders, implies that: {\it (i)} dark matter must have a mass $\lesssim \Lambda_{SM}$, {\it (ii)} Higgs-curvature coupling must be $\approx 1.3\%$, {\it (iii)} the SM RGEs must remain nearly as in the SM, and {\it (iv)} right-handed neutrinos must have a mass $\lesssim 1000\, {\rm TeV}$. These signatures serve as a concise testbed for symmergence.Comment: 32 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. v3: Added a new section, new references and a figure; Reorganized sections; Journal versio

Effects of Curvature-Higgs Coupling on Electroweak Fine-Tuning

It is shown that, nonminimal coupling between the Standard Model (SM) Higgs field and spacetime curvature, present already at the renormalizable level, can be fine-tuned to stabilize the electroweak scale against power-law ultraviolet divergences. The nonminimal coupling acts as an extrinsic stabilizer with no effect on the loop structure of the SM, if gravity is classical. This novel fine-tuning scheme, which could also be interpreted within Sakharov's induced gravity approach, works neatly in extensions of the SM involving additional Higgs fields or singlet scalars.Comment: 11 pp. Added reference

Induced Affine Inflation

Induced gravity, metrical gravity in which gravitational constant arises from vacuum expectation value of a heavy scalar, is known to suffer from Jordan frame vs. Einstein frame ambiguity, especially in inflationary dynamics. Induced gravity in affine geometry, as we show here, leads to an emergent metric and gravity scale, with no Einstein-Jordan ambiguity. While gravity is induced by the vacuum expectation value of the scalar field, nonzero vacuum energy facilitates generation of the metric. Our analysis shows that induced gravity results in a relatively large tensor-to-scalar ratio in both metrical and affine gravity setups. However, the fact remains that the induced affine gravity provides an ambiguity-free framework.Comment: 7 pages, 1 table and 3 figures, matches the published versio

Tunneling in Polymer Quantization and the Quantum Zeno Effect

As an application of the polymer quantization scheme, in this work we investigate the one dimensional quantum mechanical tunneling phenomenon from the perspective of polymer representation of a non-relativistic point particle and derive the transmission and reflection coefficients. Since any tunneling phenomenon inevitably evokes a tunneling time we attempt an analytical calculation of tunneling times by defining an operator well suited in discrete spatial geometry. The results that we come up with hint at appearance of the Quantum Zeno Effect in polymer framework.Comment: 21pp,3 figures, to be published in Phys. Lett.