2018/08/23 by Stephen P. Martin, Hiren H. Patel · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.98.076008
published as Phys. Rev. D 98, 076008 (2018) · 53 pages
arxiv created 2018/08/23 · arxiv updated 2018/10/24
We obtain the two-loop effective potential for general renormalizable theories, using a generalized gauge-fixing scheme that includes as special cases the background-field Rξ gauges, the Fermi gauges, and the familiar Landau gauge, and using dimensional regularization in the bare and \MSbar renormalization schemes. As examples, the results are then specialized to the Abelian Higgs model and to the Standard Model. In the case of the Standard Model, we study how the vacuum expectation value and the minimum vacuum energy depend numerically on the gauge-fixing parameters. The results at fixed two-loop order exhibit non-convergent behavior for sufficiently large gauge-fixing parameters; this can presumably be addressed by a resummation of higher-order contributions.