Effects of Curvature-Higgs Coupling on Electroweak Fine-Tuning

Abstract

It is shown that nonminimal coupling between the Standard Model (SM) Higgs field and spacetime curvature, present already at the renormalizable level, can be fine-tuned to stabilize the electroweak scale against power-law ultraviolet divergences. The nonminimal coupling acts as an extrinsic stabilizer with no effect on the loop structure of the SM, if gravity is classical. This novel fine-tuning scheme, which could also be interpreted within Sakharov's induced gravity approach, works neatly in extensions of the SM involving additional Higgs fields or singlet scalars.