Softly broken conformal symmetry and the stability of the electroweak scale

Abstract

We point out a possible mechanism by which the electroweak hierarchy problem can be avoided in the low energy effective quantum field theory. Assuming the existence of a UV complete underlying fundamental theory and treating the cutoff scale Λ of the effective field theory as a real physical scale we argue that the hierarchy problem would be solved if the coefficient in front of quadratic divergences vanished at the scale Λ, and if the effective theory mass parameters fixed at Λ by the fundamental theory were hierarchically smaller than Λ itself. While this mechanism most probably cannot work in the Standard Model if the scale Λ is to be close to the Planck scale, we show that it can work in a minimal extension (Conformal Standard Model) proposed recently for a different implementation of conformal symmetry breaking.