Hierarchy problem and naturalness of the Higgs mass
The Higgs boson weighs about 130 times as much as a proton, yet quantum effects should push its mass up toward far heavier scales such as the Planck mass, about $10^{19}$ proton masses. Something must keep it light, and nobody knows what.
Why it matters
The answer fixes whether new particles must exist near the TeV scale reachable by colliders.
Review
G. F. Giudice, The Dawn of the Post-Naturalness Era, arXiv, 2017. https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07663 reference checked
Editors' decisions
- Accept of version 2, , on 2026-10-15. Decision record
Timestamp record
- Signed record
- 8622c0dec999…
- Public log
- Entry 244, in checkpoint 2,123
- In the log by
- Block 969,698, 2026-10-03
This text was in the PubPhys log by that date. The date says nothing about when the problem was first posed.