Are oscillons present during a first order electroweak phase transition?

Abstract

It has been recently argued that localized, unstable, but extremely long-lived configurations, called oscillons, could affect the dynamics of a first order electroweak phase transition in an appreciable way. Treating the amplitude and the size of subcritical bubbles as statistical degrees of freedom, we show that thermal fluctuations are not strong enough to generate subcritical configurations able to settle into a an oscillon long-lived regime.

Comments: 13 pages, 2 figures available upon request