The mirage of the fermi scale

The discovery of a light Higgs boson at Large Hadron Collider may be suggesting that we need to revise our model building paradigms to understand the origin of the weak scale. We explore the possibility that the Fermi scale is not fundamental but rather a derived one, i.e. a low energy mirage. We show that this scenario emerges in a very natural way in models previously used to break the electroweak symmetry dynamically and suggest a simple dynamical framework for this idea. In our model the electroweak scale results from the interplay between two very high energy scales, one typically of the order of ΛUV ∼ 1010 GeV and the other around MU ∼ 1016 GeV, although other values are also possible. © 2013 World Scientific Publishing Company