Cosmological phase transitions without high-temperature expansions
Abstract
We introduce a new framework for perturbatively computing equilibrium thermodynamic properties of cosmological phase transitions to high loop orders, using the full four-dimensional resummed thermal effective potential and avoiding the limitations of standard high-temperature approximations. By systematically disentangling the physics of hard and soft momentum scales, our approach unifies their treatment within a single expression, enabling consistent handling of both vacuum and thermal divergences across all mass regimes. This core innovation enables the efficient numerical evaluation of massive multiloop thermal sum-integrals, achieved through a finite-temperature generalization of Loop-Tree Duality -- an advanced algorithmic technique originally developed to render vacuum Feynman integrals numerically tractable via Monte Carlo methods. As a proof of principle, we apply the framework to a scalar-Yukawa model, presenting a complete two-loop calculation and a novel three-loop extension -- the first fully massive three-loop sum-integral computation without relying on high-temperature expansions. Our approach opens the door to precise perturbative predictions of the phase structure in a broad class of beyond-the-Standard-Model scenarios, including those featuring strong first-order phase transitions relevant for gravitational-wave signals, where conventional high-temperature approximations break down.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.07014,
title = {Cosmological phase transitions without high-temperature expansions},
author = {Pablo Navarrete and Risto Paatelainen and Kaapo Seppänen and Tuomas V. I. Tenkanen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.07014},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
14 pages, 3 figures, 6 appendices