Higgsed by the vacuum, II

Continuing the previous post... What Alejandro Rivero actually said to me was,

"Yesterday I went to a popularisation talk of De Rujula, and I was thinking on the mismatch between vacuum energy due to higgs and vacuum energy seen in astrophysics. It sounds as the problem with the string energy scale, QCD string vs "gravity" string."

This remark helped to suggest a crackpot interpretation of the preceding Higgs-VEV numerology, as a sign that the higgsing in the Standard Model is done by the total vacuum energy, which mysteriously conforms to the new ansatz that "the zero-point energy of a quantum field is equal to the mass of one quantum of the field".

Now I want to take things a little further... One of the "movements" spun off from string theory is that of "large extra dimensions" (also sometimes called "universal extra dimensions"). In such models, the Planck scale can come all the way down to the TeV scale. Under such circumstances, the QCD string could well become a fundamental string. I don't remember the LED model-builders ever talking about this possibility, but it certainly dovetails with Alejandro's other ideas about the "sBootstrap".

So here is the new twist. As he observes, the astrophysical dark energy, which is often interpreted as vacuum energy, is orders of magnitude away from the Higgs field vacuum energy. But what if... we assume the new crackpot ansatz, that "higgsing is done by the total vacuum energy", and that the cosmologically relevant vacuum energy has been diluted by a large-extra-dimensions mechanism, perhaps similar to Randall-Sundrum? Or even by a non-geometric, noncommutative analogue of LED...