One residue to rule them all: Electroweak symmetry breaking, inflation
  and field-space geometry
  We point out that the successful generation of the electroweak scale via
gravitational instanton configurations in certain scalar-tensor theories can be
viewed as the aftermath of a simple requirement: the existence of a quadratic
pole with a sufficiently small residue in the Einstein-frame kinetic term for
the Higgs field. In some cases, the inflationary dynamics may also be
controlled by this residue and therefore related to the Fermi-to-Planck mass
ratio, up to possible uncertainties associated with the instanton
regularization. We present here a unified framework for this hierarchy
generation mechanism, showing that the aforementioned residue can be associated
with the curvature of the Einstein-frame target manifold in models displaying
spontaneous breaking of dilatations. Our findings are illustrated through
examples previously considered in the literature.
