Wilson line in high temperature particle physics

TL;DR

This paper explores the role of Wilson lines in high temperature particle physics, introducing an effective action approach that reveals gauge invariance, phase-dependent phenomena, and potential implications for symmetry breaking and metastable states.

Contribution

It develops a systematic, gauge-invariant effective action for Wilson lines at high temperatures, enabling analysis of symmetry breaking, domain walls, and metastable states in various gauge theories.

Findings

Effective action provides a gauge-invariant infrared cutoff.

Disappearance of domain walls at low temperatures.

Existence of long-lived metastable states with CP violation.

Abstract

The physics of the Wilson line leads to new developments in high temperature particle physics. The main tool is the effective action for a given fixed value of the phase of the Wilson line. It furnishes a gauge invariant infrared cut off, and yields for small values of the phases a systematic procedure for obtaining a power series in the coupling g and glog(1/g). It breaks the centergroup symmetry of the gauge group only at high temperature so leads to domain walls disappearing at low temperatures. It shows long lived metastable states in the standard model, SU(5), SO(10) and its SUSY partners, with possibilities for CP violation and thermal inflation.