Decoupling, effective Lagrangian, and gauge hierarchy in spontaneously broken non-Abelian gauge theories

Abstract

In spontaneously broken non-Abelian gauge theories which admit gauge hierarchy at the tree level, we show, to all orders in perturbation theory, that (i) the superheavy particles decouple from the light sector at low energies, (ii) an effective low-energy renormalizable theory emerges together with appropriate counterterms, and (iii) the gauge hierarchy can be consistently maintained in the presence of radiative corrections. These assertions are explicitly demonstrated for O(3) gauge theory with two triplets of Higgs particles in a manner easily applicable to more realistic grand unified theories. Furthermore, as a byproduct of our analysis, we obtain a systematic method of computing the parameters of the effective low-energy theory via renormalization-group equations to any desired accuracy.