Related papers: Nonperturbative Contributions to the Hot Electrowe…
A quantitative discussion of nonperturbative effects for the high temperature electroweak phase transition is presented. We propose a method for the computation of the temperature dependent effective scalar potential that takes into account…
For the central values of the relevant experimental inputs, that is the strong coupling constant and the top quark and Higgs masses, the effective Higgs potential displays two minima, one at the electroweak scale and a deeper one at high…
The effective action describing the long range fluctuations in the high temperature phase of the electroweak standard theory is a strongly coupled SU(2)-Higgs-model in three dimensions. We outline in detail a model in which the spatial…
We study theories which naturally select a vacuum with parametrically small Electroweak Scale due to finite temperature effects in the early universe. In particular, there is a scalar with an approximate shift symmetry broken by a…
The measured values of the Higgs and top quark mass indicate that the electroweak vacuum is metastable if there is no new physics below the Planck scale. This is at odds with a period of high scale inflation. A non-minimal coupling between…
We study models of strong first order `low' temperature electroweak phase transition. To achieve this we propose a class of Higgs effective potential models which preserve the known features of the present day massive phase. However, the…
We examine in non-Abelian gauge theory the heavy quark limit in the presence of the (anti-)self-dual homogeneous background field and see that a confining potential emerges, consistent with the Wilson criterion, although the potential is…
We study the importance of thermal fluctuations during the electroweak phase transition. We evaluate in detail the equilibrium number density of large amplitude subcritical fluctuations and discuss the importance of phase mixing to the…
We propose a possibility that the inflaton potential is significantly modified after inflation due to heavy field dynamics. During inflation there may be a heavy scalar field stabilized at a value deviated from the low-energy minimum. As…
Extrapolating the Standard Model Higgs potential at high energies, we study the barrier between the electroweak and Planck scale minima. The barrier arises by taking the central values of the relevant experimental inputs, that is the strong…
We study the impact of background electric fields on a hot plasma of charged particles -- a setting relevant for the early stages of heavy-ion collisions as well as laser pulse experiments. Historically, the electric susceptibility --…
Just like the weakly interacting QED can support non-perturbative phenomena, like atoms, so can the weak and Higgs interactions. Especially, there are strong field-theoretical arguments that only bound states can be the (quasi-)asymptotic…
A recent construction of the electroweak theory, based on perturbative quantum gauge invariance alone, is extended to the case of more generations of fermions with arbitrary mixing. The conditions implied by second order gauge invariance…
Two paradigms for the origin of electroweak superconductivity are a weakly coupled scalar condensate, and a strongly coupled fermion condensate. The former suffers from a finetuning problem unless there are cancelations to radiative…
A Heisenberg uncertainty relation is derived for spatially-gated electric and magnetic field fluctuations. The uncertainty increases for small gating sizes which implies that in confined spaces the quantum nature of the electromagnetic…
The high-temperature limit of the 2-loop effective potential for the Higgs field is calculated from an effective 3d theory, in a general covariant gauge. It is shown explicitly that a gauge-independent result can be extracted for the…
We evaluate the gauge invariant effective potential for the composite field $\sigma=2\Phi^{\dagger}\Phi$ in the SU(2)-Higgs model at finite temperature. Symmetric and broken phases correspond to the domains $\sigma\leq T^2/3$ and $\sigma >…
The mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking in Little Higgs Models is analyzed in an effective field theory approach. This enables us to identify observable effects irrespective of the specific structure and content of the heavy degrees…
Light new physics weakly coupled to the Higgs can induce a strong first-order electroweak phase transition (EWPT). Here, we argue that scenarios in which the EWPT is driven first-order by a light scalar with mass between $\sim 10$ GeV -…
We develop a method for the construction of the effective potential at high temperatures based on the effective field theory approach and renormalization group. It allows one to sum up the leading logarithms in all orders of perturbation…