Despite the enormous significance of the Higgs potential in the context of the standard model of electroweak interactions and in grand unified theories, its ultimate origin is fundamentally unknown and must be introduced by hand in accordance with the underlying gauge symmetry and the requirement of renormalizability. Here we propose a more physical motivation for the structure of the Higgs potential, which we derive from a generalized Brans– Dicke (BD) theory containing two interacting scalar fields. One of these fields is coupled to curvature as in the BD formulation, whereas the other is coupled to gravity both derivatively and non-derivatively through the curvature scalar and the Ricci tensor. By requiring that the cosmological solutions of the model are consistent with observations, we show that the effective scalar field potential adopts the Higgs potential form with a mildly time-evolving vacuum expectation value. This residual vacuum dynamics could be responsible for the possible time variation of the fundamental constants, and is reminiscent of former Bjorken’s ideas on the cosmological constant problem.
