Taming Infrared Divergences in the Effective Potential

Understand

The Higgs effective potential in the Standard Model (SM), calculated perturbatively, generically suffers from infrared (IR) divergences when the (field-dependent) tree-level mass of the Goldstone bosons goes to zero.

• Such divergences can affect both the potential and its first derivative and become worse with increasing loop order.
• In this paper we show that these IR divergences are spurious, we perform a simple resummation of all IR-problematic terms known (up to three loops) and explain how to extend the resummation to cure all such divergences to any order.
• The method is of general applicability and would work in scenarios other than the SM.