10–14 Aug 2026
Europe/Madrid timezone
IMPORTANT: Traffic restrictions will be in place the day of the eclipse. Access to our viewing site will only be possible via the conference buses (see scientific bulletin).

Higgs Criticality and WIMP Dark Matter

13 Aug 2026, 15:33
5m
Young Scientist Forum talk + poster Young Scientist Forum

Speaker

Maximilian Detering

Description

We proposes a novel link between the hierarchy problem and Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), suggesting that the small mass of the Higgs boson arises from the universe’s WIMP-induced proximity to the critical boundary of a phase transition. Intriguingly, such a requirement aligns with the so-called “WIMP miracle”: a WIMP with mass around the weak scale and Standard Model couplings not only happens to have the correct thermal relic abundance to be the observed dark matter, it can also naturally destabilise the Higgs potential just above the weak scale. This coincidence may signify a more direct link between WIMP dark matter and Higgs naturalness than anticipated from traditional symmetry-based explanations. Using a Higgsino-like singlet–doublet model, we show that our Higgs criticality scenario is compatible with TeV-scale WIMP dark matter. It can be thoroughly probed in direct detection experiments, astrophysical signals and future collider searches. These findings further motivate a comprehensive exploration of the remaining heavy WIMP parameter space.

arXiv number (if applicable) 2511.xxxxx
Position PhD student

Authors

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