A Mechanism of Ultraviolet Naturalness

Abstract: The Standard Model (SM), as the quantum field theory of the strong and electroweak interactions, needs be carried into curved spacetime to incorporate gravity. This is done here not for the full but for the effective SM action by integrating-in affine curvature. This approach leads to naturalization of the SM Higgs sector and reduction of the cosmological constant down to the neutrino scale thanks to the fact that quadratic (quartic) UV contributions to the Higgs boson mass (vacuum energy) turn into the Higgs-curvature coupling (the Einstein-Hilbert term). New physics beyond the SM, necessary for inducing gravity properly, does not have to interact with the SM. It can form a secluded sector to source non-interacting dark matter observable via only gravity, or a weakly-coupled sector to source dark matter and possible collider signals.