Electroweak Theory without a Higgs potential: Radiative Effects

TL;DR

This paper investigates a Higgs-less approach to electroweak symmetry breaking, demonstrating that radiative effects can generate masses for gauge bosons without a classical Higgs potential, challenging previous interpretations.

Contribution

It introduces a gauge-free formulation of electrodynamics to compute the one-loop effective potential, revealing radiative mass generation mechanisms in the absence of a Higgs potential.

Findings

Radiative effects cancel the local functional measure of the Higgs field.

The effective potential has a minimum away from zero, enabling mass generation.

The gauge-free approach simplifies calculations by eliminating gauge fixing.

Abstract

We examine the one loop effective potential in a recently proposed (by Chernodub et. al.) alternative approach to mass generation in the Higgs-gauge sector of the electroweak theory, which does not make use of a classical Higgs potential. We show that the interpretation given by these authors, of the Higgs boson as the conformal degree of freedom in a background conformal gravity theory, is invalidated because genuine one loop radiative effects cancel the local functional measure of the Higgs field taken to be the basis of this interpretation. Functional evaluation of the one loop effective Higgs potential leads to a minimum away from the origin, thereby providing yet another radiative mass generation scheme for weak gauge bosons. In arriving at the one loop effective potential we make use of the gauge free formulation of electrodynamics introduced by us earlier, which obviates any need for gauge fixing.