One residue to rule them all: Electroweak symmetry breaking, inflation and field-space geometry

Abstract

We point out that the successful generation of the electroweak scale via gravitational instanton configurations in certain scalar-tensor theories can be viewed as the aftermath of a simple requirement: the existence of a quadratic pole with a sufficiently small residue in the Einstein-frame kinetic term for the Higgs field. In some cases, the inflationary dynamics may also be controlled by this residue and therefore related to the Fermi-to-Planck mass ratio, up to possible uncertainties associated with the instanton regularization. We present here a unified framework for this hierarchy generation mechanism, showing that the aforementioned residue can be associated with the curvature of the Einstein-frame target manifold in models displaying spontaneous breaking of dilatations. Our findings are illustrated through examples previously considered in the literature.