Gravity Waves from a Cosmological Phase Transition: Gauge Artifacts and Daisy Resummations

Understand

The finite-temperature effective potential customarily employed to describe the physics of cosmological phase transitions often relies on specific gauge choices, and is manifestly not gauge-invariant at finite order in its perturbative expansion.

• As a result, quantities relevant for the calculation of the spectrum of stochastic gravity waves resulting from bubble collisions in first-order phase transitions are also not gauge-invariant.
• We assess the quantitative impact of this gauge-dependence on key quantities entering predictions for gravity waves from first order cosmological phase transitions.
• We resort to a simple abelian Higgs model, and discuss the case of R_xi gauges.