The effective potential in Fermi gauges beyond the standard model

Abstract

Abstract We derive the field-dependent masses in Fermi gauges for arbitrary scalar extensions of the Standard Model. These masses can be used to construct the effective potential for various models of new physics. We release a flexible Mathematica notebook (VefFermi) which performs these calculations and renders large-scale phenomenological studies of various models possible. Motivated by the debate on the importance of gauge dependence, we show that, even in relatively simple models, there exist points where the global minimum is discontinuous in the gauge parameter. Such points require some care in discovering, indicating that a gauge-dependent treatment might still give reasonable results when examining the global features of a model.