First-order electroweak phase transitions: a nonperturbative update

Understand

We study first-order electroweak phase transitions nonperturbatively, assuming any particles beyond the Standard Model are sufficiently heavy to be integrated out at the phase transition.

• Utilising high temperature dimensional reduction, we perform lattice Monte-Carlo simulations to calculate the main quantities characterising the transition: the critical temperature, the latent heat, the surface tension and the bubble nucleation rate, updating and extending previous lattice studies.
• We focus on the region where the theory gives first-order phase transitions due to an effective reduction in the Higgs self-coupling and give a detailed comparison with perturbation theory.