Planck and Electroweak Scales Emerging from Weyl Conformal Gravity

Abstract

We show that the Planck mass scale can be generated from conformal gravity in the Weyl conformal geometry via the Coleman-Weinberg mechanism of dimensional transmutation where quantum corrections stemming from the gravitational field and the Weyl gauge field trigger the symmetry breakdown of a local Weyl symmetry. It is also shown that the vacuum expectation value of a scalar field is transmitted to a sector of the standard model through a potential involving the scale invariant part and the contribution from the Coleman-Weinberg mechanism, thereby generating the electroweak scale.