Dilaton-assisted generation of the Fermi scale from the Planck scale

Abstract

In scale-invariant theories of gravity the Planck mass $M_P$, which appears due to spontaneous symmetry breaking, can be the only scale at the classical level. It was argued that the second scale can be generated by a quantum non-perturbative gravitational effect. The new scale, associated with the Higgs vacuum expectation value, can be orders of magnitude below $M_P$, leading to the hierarchy between the Fermi and the Planck scales. We study a theory in which the non-perturbative effect is sensitive both to the physics at energy scales as high as $M_P$ and to the low-energy, Standard Model physics. This makes it possible to constrain the mechanism from experiment. We find that the crucial ingredients of the mechanism are non-minimal coupling of the scalar fields to gravity, the approximate Weyl invariance at high energies, and the metastability of the low-energy vacuum.

13 pages, 5 figures; v2: matches the journal version

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Scale-Invariant Quadratic Gravity and Inflation in the Palatini Formalism
• Matter matters in Einstein-Cartan gravity
• Scale and Weyl Invariance in Einstein-Cartan Gravity
• QFT without infinities and hierarchy problem
• Higgs-Dilaton Inflation in Einstein-Cartan gravity