Electroweak Theory without a Higgs potential: Radiative Effects

Abstract

We examine the one loop effective potential in a recently proposed (by Chernodub et. al.) alternative approach to mass generation in the Higgs-gauge sector of the electroweak theory, which does not make use of a classical Higgs potential. We show that the interpretation given by these authors, of the Higgs boson as the conformal degree of freedom in a background conformal gravity theory, is invalidated because genuine one loop radiative effects cancel the local functional measure of the Higgs field taken to be the basis of this interpretation. Functional evaluation of the one loop effective Higgs potential leads to a minimum away from the origin, thereby providing yet another radiative mass generation scheme for weak gauge bosons. In arriving at the one loop effective potential we make use of the gauge free formulation of electrodynamics introduced by us earlier, which obviates any need for gauge fixing.

8 Pages Latex 2e with one eps figure

References in corpus (6)

• Conformal Symmetry and the Standard Model
• Spin-Charge Separation, Conformal Covariance and the SU(2) Yang-Mills Theory
• Non-Abelian Supercurrents and de Sitter Ground State in Electroweak Theory
• Symmetry breaking, conformal geometry and gauge invariance
• Light neutralino dark matter with a very light Higgs for CoGeNT and DAMA/LIBRA data
• Embedding Brans-Dicke gravity into electroweak theory