Gravitational Coleman-Weinberg Mechanism

Abstract

The Coleman-Weinberg mechanism provides a procedure by which a scalar field, which initially has no mass parameters, acquires a mass due to the anomalous nature of scale symmetry. Loop corrections trigger a spontaneous symmetry breaking and the appearance of a non-trivial vacuum. We first review the basic example of the ColemanWeinberg mechanism, scalar Quantum Electrodynamics, in a perturbative regime where the scalar particle becomes massive through photon loops. We then present the main results of this article, what we name the gravitational Coleman-Weinberg mechanism: we analyse the same effect in a gravitational theory without explicit energy scales at tree-level. Finally, we also study the mechanism for two scalar fields in the mentioned gravitational theory. We will derive the gravitational Coleman-Weinberg potentials, analyse the parameter space where we have a symmetry breaking, and obtain the value of the corresponding scalar masses.

18 pages, 3 figures. Matches version published in JHEP

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• Dark Matter from R^2-gravity
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• Scattering amplitudes in dimensionless quadratic gravity coupled to QED
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