The hierarchy problem and fine-tuning in a decoupling approach to multi-scale effective potentials

Abstract: In many realizations of beyond the Standard Model theories, new massive particles are introduced, leading to a multi-scale system with widely separated energy scales. In this setting the Coleman-Weinberg effective potential, which describes the vacuum of the theory at the quantum level, has to be supplemented with a prescription to handle the hierarchy in mass scales. In any quantum field theory involving scalar fields and multiple, highly differing mass scales, it is in general not possible to choose a single renormalization scale that will remove all the large logarithms in the effective potential. In this paper, we focus on the so-called decoupling method, which freezes the effects of heavy particles on the renormalization group running of the light degrees of freedom at low energies. We study this for a simple two-scalar theory and find that, while the decoupling method leads to an acceptable and convergent effective potential, the method does not solve the fine-tuning problem that is inherent to the hierarchy problem of multi-scale theories. We also consider an alternative implementation of the decoupling approach, which gives different results for the shape of the potential, but still leads to similar conclusions on the amount of fine-tuning in the model. We suggest a way to avoid running into this fine-tuning problem by adopting a prescription on how to fix parameters in such decoupling approaches.