Interplay of infrared divergences and gauge dependence of the effective potential

Abstract

The perturbative effective potential suffers infrared (IR) divergences in gauges with massless Goldstones in their minima (like the Landau or Fermi gauges), but the problem can be fixed by a suitable resummation of the Goldstone propagators. When the potential minimum is generated radiatively, gauge independence of the potential at the minimum also requires resummation, and we demonstrate that the resummation that solves the IR problem also cures the gauge-dependence issue, showing this explicitly in the Abelian Higgs model in the Fermi gauge. In the process, we find an IR divergence (in the first derivative of the potential) specific to the Fermi gauge and not appreciated in the recent literature. We show that physical observables can still be computed in this gauge, and we further show how to get rid of this divergence by a field redefinition. All these results generalize to the Standard Model case.