The Strongly Interacting Electroweak Phase Transition

Abstract

A quantitative discussion of nonperturbative effects for the high temperature electroweak phase transition is presented. We propose a method for the computation of the temperature dependent effective scalar potential that takes into account the running of the effective gauge coupling. Compared to perturbation theory we find a moderate decrease of the critical temperature and an important change in the strength of the first order transition. We conclude that perturbation theory gives a misleading picture of the dynamics of the transition.

Comments: 17 pages + 5 ps-figures, LaTeX