Phase Transitions and Gauge Artifacts in an Abelian Higgs Plus Singlet Model

Understand

While the finite-temperature effective potential in a gauge theory is a gauge-dependent quantity, in several instances a first-order phase transition can be triggered by gauge-independent terms.

• A particularly interesting case occurs when the potential barrier separating the broken and symmetric vacua of a spontaneously broken symmetry is produced by tree-level terms in the potential.
• Here, we study this scenario in a simple Abelian Higgs model, for which the gauge-invariant potential is known, augmented with a singlet real scalar.
• We analyze the possible symmetry breaking patterns in the model, and illustrate in which cases gauge artifacts are expected to manifest themselves most severely.