First-order Electroweak phase transition with Gauge-invariant approach

TL;DR

This paper investigates the electroweak phase transition using a gauge-invariant effective field theory approach, comparing it with traditional methods, and assesses the detectability of resulting gravitational waves by future space-based interferometers.

Contribution

It introduces a gauge-invariant approach to study the electroweak phase transition and compares its results with the dimensional reduction method at two-loop level.

Findings

Phase transition parameters differ by at most a percent between methods.

Predicted gravitational wave signals are below the detection threshold of upcoming interferometers.

Gauge-invariant approach provides a reliable alternative for electroweak phase transition analysis.

Abstract

We study the electroweak phase transition dynamics with a three-dimensional standard model effective field theory under a gauge-invariant approach. We observe that, at the two-loop level, the phase transition parameters obtained with the gauge invariant approach can at most deviate from that of the dimensional reduction method around the percent level. We further found that the predicted gravitational wave signals at the new physics scale $\Lambda\gtrsim 590$ GeV are unreachable by the space-based interferometers, such as: LISA, TianQin, and Taiji.