A Critical Look at the Electroweak Phase Transition
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
2021-02-03 v1
Abstract
The electroweak phase transition broke the electroweak symmetry. Perturbative methods used to calculate observables related to this phase transition suffer from severe problems such as gauge dependence, infrared divergences, and a breakdown of perturbation theory. In this paper we develop robust perturbative tools for dealing with phase transitions. We argue that gauge and infrared problems are absent in a consistent power-counting. We calculate the finite temperature effective potential to two loops for general gauge-fixing parameters in a generic model. We demonstrate gauge invariance, and perform numerical calculations for the Standard Model in Fermi gauge.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2006.12614,
title = {A Critical Look at the Electroweak Phase Transition},
author = {Andreas Ekstedt and Johan Löfgren},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.12614},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
39 pages, 2 figures