Higher orders for cosmological phase transitions: a global study in a Yukawa model

Gould, Oliver; Xie, Cheng

Abstract

We perform a state-of-the-art global study of the cosmological thermal histories of a simple Yukawa model, and find higher perturbative orders to be important for determining both the presence and strength of strong first-order phase transitions. Using high-temperature effective field theory, we calculate the free energy density of the model up to O(y5T4), where y is the Yukawa coupling and T is the temperature. The locations of phase transitions are found using the results of lattice Monte-Carlo simulations, and the strength of first-order transitions are evaluated within perturbation theory, to 3-loop order. This is the first global study of any model at this order. Compared to a vanilla 1-loop analysis, accurate to O(y2T4), reaching such accuracy enables on average a five-fold reduction in the relative uncertainty in the predicted critical temperature Tc, and an additional ∼ 50% strong first-order transitions with latent heat L/Tc4> 0.1 to be identified in our scan.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 25, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Dec 7, 2023
• Publication Date: Dec 7, 2023
• Deposit Date: Dec 16, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 18, 2023
• Journal: Journal of High Energy Physics
• Electronic ISSN: 1029-8479
• Publisher: Springer Verlag
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 2023
• Issue: 12
• Article Number: 49
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep12%282023%29049
• Keywords: Thermal Field Theory, Effective Field Theories, Phase Transitions in the Early Universe, Cosmology of Theories BSM
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/28434208
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP12(2023)049
• Additional Information: Received: 5 October 2023; Accepted: 25 November 2023; First Online: 7 December 2023. Open Access . This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.