Hard Thermal Loops in the Electroweak Theory

TL;DR

This paper derives a thermal effective action for soft fields in the broken phase of the electroweak theory, generalizing hard thermal loop results to include the Higgs mechanism and heavy Higgs bosons, and computes thermal mass corrections.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized thermal effective action for the electroweak theory with a Higgs mechanism, extending previous Yang-Mills results to the broken phase.

Findings

Thermal corrections to W, Z, and photon masses are obtained.

The effective action generalizes hard thermal loop results to the electroweak context.

Applicable to strongly interacting Higgs sectors in the broken phase.

Abstract

We derive a thermal effective action for soft fields in the broken phase of the electroweak theory in the limit of a strongly interacting Higgs sector. This action is just the proper generalization of the hard thermal loop effective action of a Yang-Mills theory when there is a Higgs mechanism and for a heavy Higgs boson. One can obtain from this action the thermal corrections to the masses of the W, Z and the photon.