English

Hard thermal contributions to phase transition observables at NNLO

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-02-09 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

To construct the high-temperature effective field theory of gauge-Higgs models up to O(g6)\mathcal{O}(g^6) in the gauge coupling, we integrate out hard modes to three-loop level and use the next-to-next-to-leading order effective potential. For the Abelian Higgs model, we quantify the impact of both higher-dimensional operators and higher-loop corrections on thermodynamic parameters relevant for gravitational-wave observables, finding that one-loop dimension-six effects typically dominate over two- and three-loop corrections to super-renormalizable parameters for the strongest transitions. We derive the three-loop scalar and Debye masses for the U(1){\rm U(1)} and SU(N){\rm SU}(N) gauge-Higgs models, as well as the two-loop quartic couplings for the Abelian case, show gauge independence of physical parameters, and demonstrate that no new master integrals are required for the matching, while consistency of 4d and 3d renormalizability points to previously missing contributions in these master integrals.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.06962,
  title  = {Hard thermal contributions to phase transition observables at NNLO},
  author = {Fabio Bernardo and Mikael Chala and Luis Gil and Philipp Schicho},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.06962},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

42 pages, 5 figures, 1 table

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:24:53.176Z