Mass from Nothing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that in a massless Abelian Higgs model, radiative corrections naturally generate masses for scalar and gauge fields without spontaneous symmetry breaking, predicting new heavy scalar resonances.

Contribution

It provides a non-perturbative analysis showing mass generation without symmetry breaking and predicts observable heavy scalar resonances, offering a novel approach to the hierarchy problem.

Findings

Masses are generated radiatively without spontaneous symmetry breaking.

The model predicts two heavy scalar resonances beyond the Higgs.

The vacuum is metastable and decays to a stable non-perturbative vacuum.

Abstract

We study the Abelian Higgs model with multiple scalar fields, but without mass terms. Solving the model non-perturbatively order-by-order in the number of scalar fields, we find that radiative corrections generate masses for the scalar and gauge boson, without spontaneous symmetry breaking. The mass scales are set by the $\Lambda$-parameter of the electroweak running coupling, thereby naturally avoiding the hierarchy problem. No part of our calculation employs a weak-coupling expansion, and we find that the perturbative vacuum is metastable, and hence must decay to the stable non-perturbative vacuum of the theory, which we identify. Although the field content of our Lagrangian is standard, our results predict the existence of two heavy scalar resonances in addition to the Higgs. We believe that these predicted resonances will ultimately allow experimentalists to discriminate between our method and standard solutions of the Higgs model.