Gravitational Coleman-Weinberg Mechanism

Understand

The Coleman-Weinberg mechanism provides a procedure by which a scalar field, which initially has no mass parameters, acquires a mass due to the anomalous nature of scale symmetry.

• Loop corrections trigger a spontaneous symmetry breaking and the appearance of a non-trivial vacuum.
• We first review the basic example of the ColemanWeinberg mechanism, scalar Quantum Electrodynamics, in a perturbative regime where the scalar particle becomes massive through photon loops.
• We then present the main results of this article, what we name the gravitational Coleman-Weinberg mechanism: we analyse the same effect in a gravitational theory without explicit energy scales at tree-level.