Gravitational Coleman–Weinberg potential and its finite temperature counterpart

Coleman–Weinberg (CW) phenomena for the case of gravitons minimally coupled to massless scalar field is studied. The one-loop effect completely vanishes if there is no self-interaction term present in the matter sector. The one-loop effective potential is shown to develop an instability in the form of acquiring an imaginary part, which can be traced to the tachyonic pole in the graviton propagator. The finite temperature counterpart of this CW potential is computed to study the behaviour of the potential in the high and low temperature regimes with respect to the typical energy scale of the theory. Finite temperature contribution to the imaginary part of gravitational CW potential exhibits a damped oscillatory behaviour; all thermal effects are damped out as the temperature vanishes, consistent with the zero-temperature result.