Two-loop effective potential, thermal resummation and first-order phase transitions: Beyond the high-temperature expansion

TL;DR

This paper develops a novel two-loop resummed effective potential calculation method at finite temperature that does not rely on high-temperature expansion, improving accuracy in studying phase transitions in gauge theories.

Contribution

It introduces a new calculation scheme for the effective potential at finite temperature that enhances precision over previous methods, especially in analyzing phase transition dynamics.

Findings

Improved accuracy of about 10% in phase transition parameters.

The stop-stop-gluon sunset diagram enhances the first-order phase transition strength.

The scheme impacts bubble dynamics significantly.

Abstract

We study a finite temperature two-loop resummed effective potential in the Abelian gauge theory. A tractable calculation scheme without using a high-temperature expansion is devised. We apply it to the Abelian-Higgs model and its extension to a minimal supersymmetric standard model-like model and study the thermal phase transition. It is shown that our scheme improves the previous results about 10% in the quantities relevant to the phase transition, and its impacts on bubble dynamics could be even more sizable. It still holds that the stop-stop-gluon sunset diagram enhances the strength of the first-order phase transition even without the high-temperature expansion.