Thermal Fluctuations and Validity of the 1-Loop Effective Potential

Abstract

We examine the validity of the 1-loop approximation to the effective potential at finite temperatures and present a simple test for its reliability. As an application we study the standard electroweak potential, showing that for a Higgs mass above 70 GeV, and afirly independent of the top mass (with $m_t>90GeV$, the 1-loop approximation is no longer valid for temperatures in the neighborhood of the critical temperature.

Comments: 15 pages , LATEX, 2 figures (not included but available upon request), DART-HEP-92/08 ``REVISED VERSION''