Lawrence Krauss just wrote an interesting letter: "Higgs Seesaw Mechanism as a Source for Dark Energy" - Krauss & Dent, PRL 2013
in it he argues for a see-saw mechanism in the Higgs sector which gives a natural scale for dark energy which is small, as observed.
The key point is that the energy scale is suppressed by
λ ~ (mH/mX)2)
where mH is the Higgs scale and X is some unification scale with mX >> mH
as a bonus you may expect a new long range weak force to go with the new physics.
Potentially interesting speculation.
Many moons ago, I wrote almost massless world on this here very blog...
where I was pondering deep issues of cosmological constants and symmetries (this was back during the flap over Lisi's speculations)
and along the way I came up with this:
"...the “prediction” of the Higgs mass really is just numerology, although I could imaging something analogous to a see-saw mechanism driving such a relation in some theory.
If I were really cleverbold I would have predicted that the Standard Model required a non-zero Lambda ;-)
But, yeah, smoothly running the Higgs mass with Lambda uses the cosmological constant to solve the hierarchy problem and postdicts the cosmology…"
(see also earlier comment)
this is the problem with blogging - if I hadn't had the blog to release my random speculations the sheer frustration might have driven me to write the PRL instead...
Interesting. did you point this to the authors?
shantanu
Nah, that'd make me too much like a cranky internet crackpot.
I have lots of random thoughts, some of which I blog, many of which I will never write as a refereed article.
Citing blog posts, much less blog comments is probably not something Phys Rev wants to get into.
Just a typo, but the theorem It is named after Jeffrey Mandula not Nelson Mandela 8-)
Duh. Thanks.
Mandela was in the news - subconscious is insidious