Lorentz violation naturalness revisited

TL;DR

This paper examines the naturalness problem of Lorentz violation in a scalar-fermion model, highlighting how scale separation and dissipation can prevent low-energy percolation of violations, thus addressing naturalness concerns.

Contribution

It demonstrates how a separation of energy scales and dissipation effects can mitigate low-energy Lorentz violation percolation, providing new insights into naturalness issues.

Findings

Scale separation can hinder low-energy Lorentz violation percolation.

Dissipation does not necessarily lead to low-energy percolation of violations.

Protection mechanisms are effective even with dissipative effects.

Abstract

We revisit here the naturalness problem of Lorentz invariance violations on a simple toy model of a scalar field coupled to a fermion field via a Yukawa interaction. We first review some well-known results concerning the low-energy percolation of Lorentz violation from high energies, presenting some details of the analysis not explicitly discussed in the literature and discussing some previously unnoticed subtleties. We then show how a separation between the scale of validity of the effective field theory and that one of Lorentz invariance violations can hinder this low-energy percolation. While such protection mechanism was previously considered in the literature, we provide here a simple illustration of how it works and of its general features. Finally, we consider a case in which dissipation is present, showing that the dissipative behaviour does not percolate generically to lower mass dimension operators albeit dispersion does. Moreover, we show that a scale separation can protect from unsuppressed low-energy percolation also in this case.