The quadratic divergences of the Higgs mass may be cancelled either accidentally or by the exchange of some new particles. Alternatively its impact on naturalness may be weakened by raising the Higgs mass, which requires changing the standard model below its natural cutoff. We show in detail how this can be achieved, while preserving perturbativity and consistency with the electroweak precision tests, by extending the standard model to include a second Higgs doublet that has neither a vev nor couplings to quarks and leptons. This inert doublet model yields a perturbative and completely natural description of electroweak physics at all energies up to 1.5 TeV. The discrete symmetry that yields the inert doublet is unbroken, so that dark matter may be composed of neutral inert Higgs bosons, which may have escaped detection at LEP2. Predictions are given for multilepton events with missing transverse energy at the Large Hadron Collider, and for the direct detection of dark matter.

• Received 18 April 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.74.015007