1996/09/30 by James M. Cline, Pierre-Anthony Lemieux · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.55.3873
published as Phys.Rev. D55 (1997) 3873-3881 · 18 pp., 5 figures, uses epsf.tex. Corrected matching conditions for analytic approximation to thermal effective potential, eq. (10), and typos in eq. (5)
openalex publication_date 1997/03/15 · arxiv created 2007/08/23 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We reexamine the strength of the first-order phase transition in the electroweak theory supplemented by an extra Higgs doublet. The finite-temperature effective potential Veff is computed to one-loop order, including the summation of ring diagrams, to study the ratio \ensuremathφc/Tc of the Higgs field VEV to the critical temperature. We make a number of improvements over previous treatments, including a consistent treatment of Goldstone bosons in Veff, an accurate analytic approximation to Veff valid for any mass-to-temperature ratios, and use of the experimentally measured top quark mass. For two-Higgs-doublet models, we identify a significant region of parameter space where \ensuremathφc/Tc is large enough for electroweak baryogenesis, and we argue that this identification should persist even at higher orders in perturbation theory. In the case of the minimal supersymmetric standard model, our results indicate that the extra Higgs bosons have little effect on the strength of the phase transition.