Paper detail

The Nightmare Scenario and the Origin of the Standard Model. "We Got it Wrong ...How did we misread the signals? ... What to Do?"

It is thought that the emergence of the "nightmare scenario" at the LHC could be a serious crisis for particle physics that could require radical new concepts and even a major paradigm change. A root cause may have been exaggeration of the significance of asymptotic freedom, leading to the historically profound mistake of formulating new short-distance extensions of the Standard Model while ignoring both serious infra-red problems and central elements of long-distance physics. In fact, pursuit of the uniquely unitary Critical Pomeron leads to a possible gauge theory origin for the Standard Model that is both radical and paradigm changing, but also explains many mysteries. A bound-state S-Matrix embedded in a unique weak coupling massless SU(5) field theory emerges. The states and interactions of the Standard Model are enhanced, and the underlying SU(5) unification suppressed, by a wee parton divergence phenomenon involving wee gauge bosons coupled to S-Matrix massless fermion anomalies. Confinement, chiral symmetry breaking, the parton model, electroweak symmetry breaking, dark matter, and neutrino masses, all appear to be present. Most significantly, perhaps, there is a Higgs boson but, as seen experimentally at the LHC, there is no new short-distance physics. The only new physics is electroweak-scale QCD interactions due to color sextet quarks.