Three-form lifting of dilaton flat direction without and with gravity

TL;DR

The paper demonstrates that coupling a dilaton to a three-form field can lift flat directions associated with scale symmetry breaking without explicit operators, resulting in an exponential plateau potential when gravity is included.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mechanism where a three-form coupling lifts dilaton flat directions while preserving gauge invariance and scale symmetry.

Findings

Flat directions can be lifted without explicit scale-violating operators.

The effective potential with gravity forms an exponential plateau.

The mechanism maintains gauge invariance and dilatation symmetry.

Abstract

Spontaneous scale symmetry breaking is commonly associated with a flat direction in the action. We show that this need not be so if the dilaton is coupled to a three-form field in a manner compatible with gauge invariance and dilatations. The resulting effective dynamics lifts the flat direction without introducing explicit scale-violating operators. When gravity is included, the corresponding potential takes the form of an exponential plateau.