Higgs Potential from Wick Rotation in Conformal BSM

Abstract

It is well known that in order to make the path integral of general relativity converge, one has to perform the Wick rotation over the conformal factor in addition to the more familiar Wick rotation of the time axis to pass to the space-time with Euclidean signature. In this article, we will apply this technique to a scalar field in the conformally invariant scalar-tensor gravity with a conformally invariant beyond-standard-model (BSM). It is then shown that a potential term in the conformally invariant potential, which corresponds to the Higgs mass term in the Higgs potential of the standard model (SM), can have a negative coefficient. The change of sign of the potential term naturally induces spontaneous symmetry breakdown of the electroweak gauge symmetry after symmetry breaking of conformal symmetry (local scale symmetry) via the Coleman-Weinberg mechanism around the Planck scale. The present study might shed light on the fact that the existence of a stable vacuum in quantum gravity is relevant to that in the SM.

10 pages

References in corpus (6)

• Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
• Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC
• Quantum scale invariance, cosmological constant and hierarchy problem
• Classically Scale-invariant B-L Model and Dilaton Gravity
• Classical Weyl Transverse Gravity
• Planck and Electroweak Scales Emerging from Conformal Gravity