Gravitational waves from supercooled phase transitions: dimensional transmutation meets dimensional reduction

TL;DR

This paper investigates how high-temperature effective field theories can accurately describe supercooled phase transitions in models with radiative symmetry breaking, impacting gravitational wave predictions.

Contribution

It demonstrates the applicability of 3D EFT in supercooled transitions and highlights the importance of next-to-leading order corrections for GW observables.

Findings

3D EFT effectively models supercooled phase transitions

Next-to-leading order corrections significantly influence GW predictions

Challenges in EFT description of highly supercooled transitions

Abstract

Models with radiative symmetry breaking typically feature strongly supercooled first-order phase transitions, which result in an observable stochastic gravitational wave background. In this work, we analyse the role of higher order thermal corrections for these transitions, applying high-temperature dimensional reduction to a theory with dimensional transmutation. In particular, we study to what extent high-temperature effective field theories (3D EFT) can be used. We find that despite significant supercooling down from the critical temperature, the high-temperature expansion for the bubble nucleation rate can be applied using the 3D EFT framework, and we point out challenges in the EFT description. We compare our findings to previous studies, and find that the next-to-leading order corrections obtained in this work have a significant effect on the predictions for GW observables, motivating a further exploration of higher order thermal effects.