Softly broken conformal symmetry and the stability of the electroweak scale

Abstract

We point out a novel possible mechanism by which the electroweak hierarchy problem can be avoided in the (effective) quantum field theory. Assuming the existence of a UV complete underlying fundamental theory and treating the cutoff scale $\Lambda$ of the effective field theory as a real physical scale we argue that the hierarchy problem would be solved if the coefficient in front of quadratic divergences vanished for some choice of $\Lambda$, and if the effective theory mass parameters fixed at $\Lambda$ by the fundamental theory were hierarchically smaller than $\Lambda$ itself. While this mechanism most probably cannot work in the Standard Model if the scale $\Lambda$ is to be close to the Planck scale, we show that it can work in a minimal extension (Conformal Standard Model) proposed recently for a different implementation of soft conformal symmetry breaking.

6 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Conformal Symmetry and the Standard Model
• Effective Action, Conformal Anomaly and the Issue of Quadratic Divergences
• Neutrinos, Axions and Conformal Symmetry
• Remark on the subtractive renormalization of quadratically divergent scalar mass

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Higgs inflation from Standard Model criticality
• Softened Gravity and the Extension of the Standard Model up to Infinite Energy
• The Inverse Seesaw in Conformal Electro-Weak Symmetry Breaking and Phenomenological Consequences
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• Scale genesis and gravitational wave in a classically scale invariant extension of the standard model
• Dimensional regularization, Wilsonian RG, and the Naturalness/Hierarchy problem
• Physical Tuning and Naturalness
• Introduction to Quantization of Conformal Gravity
• Two-loop RGE of a general renormalizable Yang-Mills theory in a renormalization scheme with an explicit UV cutoff