Lattice (Φ ⁴)₄ effective potential giving spontaneous symmetry breaking and the role of the Higgs mass

Abstract

We present a critical reappraisal of the available results on the broken phase ofλ(Φ ⁴)₄ theory, as obtained from rigorous formal analyses and from lattice calculations. All the existing evidence is compatible with Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking but dictates a trivially free shifted field that becomes controlled by a quadratic hamiltonian in the continuum limit. As recently pointed out, this implies that the simple one-loop effective potential should become effectively exact. Moreover, the usual naive assumption that the Higgs mass-squaredm ²_h is proportional to its “renormalized” self-couplingλ _R is not valid outside perturbation theory: the appropriate continuum limit hasm _h finite and vanishingλ _R . A Monte Carlo lattice computation of theλ(Φ ⁴)₄ effective potential, both in the single-component and in theO(2)-symmetric cases, is shown to agree very well with the one-loop prediction. Moreover, its perturbative leading-log improvement (based on the concept ofλ _R ) fails to reproduce the Monte Carlo data. These results, while supporting in a new fashion the peculiar “triviality” of theλ(Φ ⁴)₄ theory, also imply that, outside perturbation theory, the magnitude of the Higgs mass does not give a measure of the observable interactions in the scalar sector of the standard model.