Renormalization group and decoupling in curved space, II. The standard model and beyond

Abstract

We continue the study of the renormalization group and decoupling of massive fields in curved space, started in [1] and analyse the higher derivative sector of the vacuum metric-dependent action of the Standard Model. The QCD sector at low-energies is described in terms of the composite effective fields. For fermions and scalars the massless limit shows perfect correspondence with the conformal anomaly, but similar limit in a massive vector case requires an extra compensating scalar. In all three cases the decoupling goes smoothly and monotonic. A particularly interesting case is the renormalization group flow in the theory with broken supersymmetry, where the sign of one of the beta-functions changes on the way from the UV to IR. © SISSA/ISAS 2003.