Crunching Dilaton, Hidden Naturalness

We introduce a new approach to the Higgs naturalness problem. The Higgs mixes with the dilaton of a conformal field theory (CFT) sector whose true ground state has a large negative vacuum energy. If the Higgs vacuum expectation value is nonzero and below O(TeV), the CFT admits a second metastable vacuum, where the expansion history of the Universe is conventional. As a result, only Hubble patches with unnaturally small values of the Higgs mass do not immediately crunch. The main experimental prediction of this mechanism is a dilaton in the 0.1-10 GeV range that mixes with the Higgs and can be detected at future colliders and experiments searching for weakly coupled particles.