Hierarchy and decoupling

Abstract

A large hierarchy between the electroweak scale and virtually any new scale of beyond-Standard-Model physics is often claimed to be unnatural. Sometimes, the apparent disparity between the measured Higgs mass and the size of the typical loop corrections encountered within such schemes is even interpretted as a profound indication that one should expect a remedy just behind the corner, probably in form of a new physics such as low-scale supersymmetry, new strong dynamics etc. In reality, all such potentially large corrections in the one- and two-point Green's functions cancel with each other in the physical Higgs mass $m_{H}$ which eventually turns out to be driven only by the electroweak VEV $v$. This, naively, may look like a miracle, the more that the standard perturbative approach often makes it irresistible to discuss the magnitudes of those corrections as if, individually, they were physically relevant. To shed some more light on this conundrum we advocate a method based on the symmetry properties of the Coleman-Weinberg effective potential which not only makes it very clear why $m_H\propto v$ to all orders in the perturbative expansion but, at the same time, it does not require any inspection of the explicit form of the tadpole equations whatsoever. Besides simplifying the calculations considerably it makes the "internal composition" of the VEV in terms of the high-scale parameters essentially irrelevant. We exemplify these findings on an extended series of specific simplified models in which the role of the heavy dynamics is played by all "reasonable" types of fields (barring gravity), i.e., by a heavy scalar, a heavy (Majorana) fermion and a heavy vector, respectively. We show that the dependence of $m_{H}$ on the heavy scale follows the expectation based on dynamical arguments such as the decoupling theorem.